Herbert Ross Brown

SOURCE: "The Sentimental Compromise," in The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860, Duke University Press, 1940. Reprint, Pageant Books, Inc., 1959, pp. 358-70.

[In the following chapter from his The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860, Brown criticizes the sentimental novel for its idealism and consequent neglect of social and political issues.]

The central experiment of the generation had been toward the reconciliation of unlikes—the humanitarian philosophy of enlightenment, perfectibility, democracy, beside the philosophy of acquisition, laissez-faire, gratuitous benevolence. Under this aegis people had played, very earnestly, many variants of a game which may be called Effects without Consequences. Religion without humility. Sensuality without smut. Laissez-faire without oppression. Benevolence without sacrifice. Little Latin and less tears. Salvation without pangs. Administration without statesmanship. Femininity without feminism. Food, and a cupboard undepleted. Bricks without straw. . . .

—E. D. Branch, The Sentimental Years, 1836-1860.

The generation which revealed itself in this abundant outpouring of sentimental novels was destined to witness stirring scenes in a great national drama. Historians have done full justice to the breath-taking events which were set in motion by the brash triumph of Andrew Jackson, and which came to an end in the Sturm und Drang of the Civil War. Few periods in history have been packed with elements so diverse and dynamic. The rise of the common man on the wings of the new democracy, the conquest of a continent, the voice of the West imperiously demanding to be heard in the councils of state, the widening breach between the planting and the commercial interest culminating in the victory of industrialism—these were but a few of the turbulent factors which added to the growing pains of an adolescent society. It was an era in which the sweep of powerful economic forces brought panics and prosperity and laid the foundations of vast private fortunes. Rapid technological advances carried in their wake unemployment, poverty, exploitation of labor, and widespread unrest. The generation learned to know the consequences of the "speed-up" in production methods and the effects of the "walkout" and the strike. It was an age seething with movements and reforms: Millerism and Mormonism, Bloomerism and Transcendentalism, Temperance and Abolition. It was an epoch abounding in prodigies and paradoxes: anesthetics and animal magnetism, electric telegraphy and mesmerism, P. T. Barnum and Ralph Waldo Emerson, mass movements and individualism, Lowell factories and Brook Farm, Godey's Lady's Book and Leaves of Grass, the dime novel and The Dial. The national arena was thronged with a motley assembly: John Jacob Astor and Thoreau, "Fanny Fern" and Margaret Fuller, the Fox Sisters and Louis Agassiz, Professors Orson Fowler and Longfellow, Sam Houston and Henry Ward Beecher, Bronson Alcott and Horace Mann. Pervading everything was an exuberant optimism, as jaunty and as expansive as the frontier. The air was electric with hope and expectancy. Millerites eagerly awaited the Day of Judgment, and Perfectionists confidently scanned the horizon for a glimpse of the morning star of the Millennium. Few were the eyes discerning enough to descry the gathering storm clouds of the irrepressible conflict.

Least of all were the sentimental novelists fitted to enlighten their readers as to the real nature of their civilization. They winced before the realities of this raucous period in which were being fashioned the sinews of a new nation. Imbued with a lyric faith in the perfectibility of man, they regarded the America of their own day as a mere vestibule to Utopia. They preferred to dwell in a cozy cloudland of sentiment, secure in a haven of dreams. "Cares cannot come into this dreamland where I live. They sink with the dying street noise, and vanish with the embers of my fire." Thus Donald Grant Mitchell in his Reveries of a Bachelor sounded the graceful notes to which the sentimentalists beat their retreat. He touched the tender stops of the same popular theme of escape in Dream Life. With angry protests over the Fugitive Slave Law jangling in his ears, Mitchell retired to a farm in his Connecticut Xanadu where he fondled the fleecy cloud drifts of feeling that eternally floated upon "the great over-arching sky of thought." "I like to be rid of them all in this midsummer's day," he wrote of the feverish cares of the fifties. "I like to steep my soul in a sea of quiet, with nothing floating past me as I lie moored to my thought, but the perfume of flowers, and soaring birds, and shadows of clouds." In Prue and I, another cherished classic of the generation, George William Curtis savored the luxuries of a roseate world viewed through the spectacles of sentiment. The amiable Prue counted it as her chief blessing that her consort was not compelled to wear "the glasses of truth." The unfortunate Titbottom, whose spectacles were unrouged by sentiment, found them to be a sorry boon; they revealed too many sharp, unupholstered facts. "I longed to enjoy the luxury of ignorant feeling, to love without knowing," he confessed sadly, "to float like a leaf upon the eddies of life, drifted now to a sunny point, now to a solemn shade—now over glittering ripples, now over gleaming calms,—and not to determined ports, a trim vessel with an inexorable rudder." This mood so felicitously evoked by Mitchell and Curtis was in exquisite harmony with popular taste. Prue and I was saluted by some enthusiastic critics as the long overdue "great American novel." Reveries of a Bachelor, published in 1850, was pirated in fifty editions. More than a million copies were sold in authorized printings. Lulled into a comfortable complacency by soporifics such as these, society drifted pleasantly toward the edge of the whirlpool.

In Letters and Leadership, Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has written acutely of the failure of much of our literature to motivate the American scene and to impregnate it with meaning because that literature too often emanated from a national mind sealed against experience. His indictment applies with peculiar force to the writings of the sentimental novelists. They were escapists, artfully evading the experiences of their own day from which letters derive much of their strength. They fed the national complacency by shrouding the actualities of American life in the flattering mists of sentimental optimism. "Phrases take the place of deeds, sentiments those of facts, and grimaces those of benevolent looks," charged Fenimore Cooper in The Sea Lions. "How weak we are!" complained Caroline Chesebro' in The Children of Light. "We are so afraid of real things and earnest lives—so contented with shams and shows—so willing to put up with the intolerable cant of scribes, pharisees and hypocrites! This forever wishing, and never, by any mistake, doing!" Everywhere in popular fiction there was a tendency to idealize or to shy away from what Mitchell has disparagingly called the "definite, sharp business" of reality. In their aversion to stubborn facts, the sentimentalists resembled Jasper in The Linwoods. "He had an instinctive dislike of definitions, as they in Scriptures, who loved darkness, had to light," declared Miss Sedgwick. "He was fond of enveloping his meaning in shadowy analogies, which, like the moon, often led astray, with a beautiful but imperfect and illusive light." Bathed in the refulgent rays of sentiment, even the most barren aspects of the American landscape were thus gilded and transfigured; white democracy and black slavery, when seen through this fuzzy haze, appeared to be comfortably compatible.

At a time when things were in the saddle, and America was in the midst of a boastful materialism, the sentimentalists felt a need of enveloping the new industrial order in an aura of approval. Accepting without critical scrutiny the sanctions of the philosophy of acquisition, they dangled the tempting bait of material prosperity before the eyes of every reader. "Fortune almost literally knocks at every man's door, and the tide is sure to flow, and in many instances, reflow past the dwellings of all," Bickley promised in The Aristocrat. Drugged with the opiate of materialism, these writers succumbed without a struggle to the national acquisitiveness. Seldom have novelists been so thoroughly at the mercy of contemporaneity. The public table laden with lavish gifts is barred only to the vicious, boasted Miss Leslie in Althea Vernon; every industrious mechanic is on the certain road to plenty. "The prizes are open to all, and they fall with equal favour," corroborated Miss Sedgwick in The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man. "The poor family of this generation is the rich family of the next." Agreeable optimism was a popular ameliorative. "It is an almost invariable truth," proclaimed Lee in The Contrast, "that a man in this country, can obtain any place for which he is properly qualified." Aroused at "the mechanical philosophy" of materialism which enshrined greed as a virtue and stultified the aspirations of the human spirit, Emerson scouted the prevailing optimism of its jaunty apologists. "And all of us apologize when we ought not, and congratulate ourselves when we ought not," he lamented in his journal in 1839.

Unmindful of warnings such as this, the sentimental novelists persisted in their mission of putting their contemporaries on extremely pleasant terms with themselves. "In the laboring class, property is a sign of good morals," announced Catharine Sedgwick. "In this country nobody sinks into deep poverty, except by some vice, directly or indirectly." This same facile apologist further declared that "In all our widespread country there is very little necessary poverty. In New England none that is not the result of vice and disease." A footnote offered pleasant assurance that the same enviable conditions obtained in New York City, where only the sinful were poor. Timothy Shay Arthur found economics to be a benevolent, not a dismal, science, in which the laws of supply and demand benignly obeyed the dictates of a convenient morality. "If, in a particular branch of business, there should occur a surplus of labor," he observed cheerfully in The Way to Prosper, "those who are most skillful, and are at the same time, sober and industrious, will be those who will find employment; while the lazy, drunken, or bad workmen, will be driven off to other and less profitable callings." Over the swift rise of capitalistic industrialism was thrown the glamorous veil of individual freedom and initiative. "You will become exactly what you choose to make yourself. . . . Everything is possible, in any place where Providence has put you," asserted Susan Warner in The Hills of the Shatemuc. Mrs. Sarah Hale admitted that increased competitive pressures and new industrial techniques had resulted in some poverty, but found ample compensation in the independence and freedom of American laborers. These redeeming factors, she stated in Northwood, distinguish "the poorest of our free citizens from the peasantry of every other country in the world." In America of the fabulous forties every prospect pleased and only foreigners were vile. "We have no low in American society," remarked the author of The Hypocrite. The few ignorant and vicious exceptions were, for the most part, immigrants and these, he added complacently, were rapidly being reformed in our penitentiaries and state prisons.

The darker aspects of the new industrialism were either blithely ignored or bathed in the warm glow of optimism. Country lads seeking their fortunes found every mill town a veritable Paradise. "The factories appeared like an abode of enchantment," Judd wrote of his young hero in Richard Edney, "and the sight revived his heart, and gave him a pleasant impression of the city, as much as a splendid church, or a sunny park of trees, or fine gardens would have done." The operatives were represented as happy and content. Richard "envied the girls, some of whom he knew, who, through that troubled winter night, were tending their looms as in the warmth, beauty, and quietness of a summer-day." Those who protested at the shameless exploitation of laborers were advised not to ponder too seriously over social maladjustments. "It is all very fair," Lee argued in The Contrast. "The rich pay their money to the poor, and in process of time, the poor, if they are industrious, grow rich." Miss Sedgwick expressed her indignation at the outcries sometimes heard against rich men. "Providence has bound the rich and poor by one chain," she had a capitalist declare in The Poor Rich Man. "Their interests are the same. If there were none of these hateful rich people," she asked, "who, think you, would build hospitals, and provide asylums for orphans, and for the deaf and dumb, and the blind?" The mercantile economy was endowed with the patriarchal ideals of the benevolent squirearchy which had dignified the life of an earlier generation. "The merchant of today is happier than was Columbus, or Drake, or Vespucius, or Raleigh, or Gilbert," averred Elizabeth Oakes Smith in The Newsboy, "for he holds in his good iron safe the wealth of a principality. . . . The chivalry of the olden time, the soul of a Bayard and a Raleigh, have been reproduced." He was, moreover, cited as the only true missionary of civilization. "He hears of famine, and oppression and suffering, and he waits no tardy movements of government, but a ship is freighted with the surplus products of an over-flowing soil, and away goes the American ship, wafted by the benedictions of thousands." If mercantile philanthropists seemed to show more zeal in dispatching succor to the remote places of the earth than to their needy neighbors at home, they merely afford one more instance of the failure of sentimental reformers to take themselves in hand before setting out to improve the world at large. Fashionable women who refused to pay a living wage to their seamstresses also eased their consciences by engaging in flattering humanitarian enterprises. "I sometimes think there is more kindness to the poor than there is justice," objected an underpaid worker in Three Experiments in Living. "The ladies are very good in getting up societies and fairs to help us; but they very often seem unwilling to pay us the full price of our labor. If they would pay us well, and give us less, it would be better for us." With sentimentalists, however, charity rarely began at home.

In their desire to represent human beings, not as they are, but as we should like to have them, the sentimental novelists almost invariably crowned their heroes' careers with worldly riches. The "success story" was immensely popular with a generation of readers who believed that every boy had an equal chance to become president. The saga of Benjamin Franklin strolling through Philadelphia with his rolls of bread under his arm, and the same Franklin, the idol of a brilliant circle at Versailles, was repeated in every household. Horace Courtenay, the ambitious hero of The Cabin and the Parlor, "had read of so many, who, like him, had started friendless boys, yet had finally won opulence and station, that he never, for a moment, doubted of success." Longfellow had provided a stirring motto for these aspiring youths whose lexicons contained no such word as fail. "I have written Excelsior on my banner," boasted Eugene in Beulah, "and I intend, like that noble youth, to press forward over every obstacle, mounting at every step, until I, too, stand on the highest pinnacle . . . I feel as if I should like to see Mr. Longfellow, to tell him how I thank him for having written it." Two avenues to riches were open to every boy, according to the author of the New England Village Choir: "The one was, to become a clerk of some wholesale or retail merchant in Boston, and the other, to pass through a college." Novelists usually were careful to clear the tracks and to give ambition the right of way. Benjamin Nelson in The Weldron Family found it was an easy leap from apprentice to partner: "Being an excellent book-keeper, and proving himself worthy of confidence by his strict integrity and unremitting attention to business, he had not been two years in the mercantile house in which he first engaged, ere he was taken into partnership by his employer." Typical of these success stories was Frederick Thomas's Clinton Bradshaw in which the hero advanced rapidly from law school to Congress without a serious setback in his career. The world seemed to be an easy oyster for fictional heroes to pry open. They invariably found pearls. Fenimore Cooper protested vainly at such sentimental mythmaking. "Success may be said to be certain," he wrote ironically in Afloat and Ashore. "I like the notion of beginning with nothing, it is so American!"

This sentimentalizing of reality is to be found at every point at which these novelists touched life. They wrote in a perpetual twilight of compromise and repression. Theirs was the captivating game of sporting decorously with indecency, of obscene thinking and straitlaced doing. Like Nora in Mrs. Hentz's Robert Graham, they laid the flattering unction to their souls that "It is not the feeling passion, but indulging it, that constitutes a sin." They betrayed a sniggering interest in sensuality without violating the merest punctilio of the moral proprieties. They were prudish Peeping Toms in a world of conventionally shaded windows; their lush modesty was nicely calculated to produce something between a smirk and a blush. "Well, there, as I live, was the prettiest chambre à coucher imaginable," exulted the author of Blonde and Brunette at the sight of a bridal suite. "The curtains were rich white silk damask looped with silver, the coverlet of white merino embroidered, the pillows and sheets trimmed with real Brussels." After reveling at length in other decorous details, Burdett revealed himself as a master in the tantalizing art of knowing just where to stop. There are those who are sensitive, he wrote solicitously, upon "approaching too near the awful secrets of wedlock." Edward Judson, known to a vast underworld of fiction readers as "Ned Buntline," delighted to conduct moral slumming excursions in his own novels. In The Mysteries and Miseries of New York, he introduced his hero to a bevy of prostitutes who were disporting themselves on "splendid ottomans." "You will find quite a variety," boasted the madame. "We have blondes and brunettes. The creole of the South; the lily of the Central States; and the snow-drop of the North." This and countless similar scenes served admirably to gratify prurient curiosity and to point an obvious moral. "Reader, we will not linger here in this garden of corruption," Judson wrote piously. "This is a book in which we have pledged ourselves not to write one line that we would not lay before a young sister's eye." There was probably no period in American history at which an ankle was so exciting, observed a recent historian of the era. The novelists made the most of it. "It is a confounded pretty foot," exclaimed a daring admirer in Ruth Hall. "I always put my coat on in the front entry, about the time she goes up stairs, to get a peep at it." Modesty without decency, love without sex, affection without passion—these were the prudish ingredients with which the sentimentalists worked. If any of them was ever tempted to call a spade a spade, he succeeded in resisting the impulse.

Much of the teaching in religious fiction was softened to an easy compliance with the universal desire for comfort and cheerfulness. In Authorship, John Neal scoffed at the widespread popularity of religious novels with their lessons heavily gilded with promises of durable material rewards. The church has "no god but gold," charged Samuel Judah in The Buccaneers. Fashionable sermons were as comfortably cushioned as the most expensive pews. A new minister in Bubbleton Parish was warned against preaching "practical sermons." "Our people generally prefer to have their pastor set forth the principles of the gospel in a forcible and attractive manner, instead of indulging in direct allusions, which are apt to irritate the feelings," advised a friendly parishioner. "It grieves them to see a minister disregard the apostolic method, and discuss in the pulpit irritating themes, such as can only mar the peace of a congregation, and disturb the unity of Christian sentiment." George William Curtis in Potiphar Papers described the readiness of the clergy to fill their sermons with the sonorous irrelevancies dear to the hearts of sentimentalists. "The cloth is very hard upon Cain, and completely routs the erring Kings of Judah," he noted. "The Spanish Inquisition, too, gets frightful knocks, and there is much eloquent exhortation to preach the gospel in the interior of Siam." Southern divines who were too honest to attempt to justify slavery by Scriptural authority took refuge in the safe doctrines of moderation and moral suasion. "I can but preach the gospel, teach the people the great law of love to God and man, and leave that to do the work gradually," concluded a pastor in Honor. "I say little about slavery, but much about justice and charity to all." To the underprivileged, the church urged the virtues of Christian resignation and the beauties of meek poverty. To wealthy communicants, she guaranteed salvation without pangs: "If you feel any wish to enter Heaven, just pave the way there by charity. It is the best road that I can point out to you, and has bridges in it, that will carry you over a multitude of sins." The Reverend Josiah Gilbert Holland found it difficult to believe that a good businessman could be "a very bad man." "Men who have exacted the last fraction of a cent with one hand, in the way of business," he submitted in his Letters to the Joneses, "have disbursed thousands of dollars with the other, in the way of charity." The sentimental pilgrim's progress to the Celestial City was made attractive by liberal stop-over privileges in Vanity Fair. There was abundant assurance, too, that even that pleasantly wicked city would, somehow or other, ultimately be washed clean with tears.

The most conspicuous failure of the sentimentalists was their inability to solve the irrepressible problem of slavery. Certainly they tried hard enough. All their cherished weapons: pleasant escape, artful dodging, cunning evasion, and comfortable compromise were brought to bear upon it without avail. Slavery stubbornly refused "to vanish like a dream" as Hawthorne had predicted it might if it were only unmolested. "But come, we will compromise—compromise cuts all the gordian knots now-a-days," urged an optimist in Miss Sedgwick's Married or Single? This was the sovereign specific in the pharmacopoeia of the sentimentalists, and they prescribed it confidently. For their facile faith in its powers there seemed to be ample warrant in the tactics of the nation's lawmakers. Had not repeated applications of this soothing emollient allayed the bothersome eruptions of this malady in 1787, 1820, 1833, and 1850? Surely, it might succeed once again. Slavery was an evil, to be sure, but one too subtly woven into the warp and woof of our existence to be handled rigorously. "It is a dark thread," admitted Caroline Lee Hentz in Marcus Warland, "but as it winds along, it gleams with bright and silvery lustre, and some of the most beautiful lights and shades of the texture are owing to the blending of these sable filaments." Were not slaves the best of domestic servants, their ebon faces shining in the glory of subserviency? Were they not happier singing spirituals by their cabin doors under the Southern moon than they would have been chanting cannibalistic war songs in darkest Africa? Had the annals of Christian benevolence anything to show more fair than the sight of a planter's wife tenderly nursing a sick old granny whose wool had grown white in her mistress's service? Were not planters carrying out God's own providence in acquainting the race of Ham with the consolations of the Gospel? What were a few short years in Louisiana rice fields to the priceless boon of eternal freedom in Beulah Land? Had not New Englanders quite enough to do to ameliorate the conditions of their own white slaves in the textile mills? Would Uncle Tom have been more comfortable in a miserable "company house" in Lawrence or Lowell than in his honeysuckle-embowered cabin in the genial Southland? Did millowners cheerfully pamper their aged operatives in their twilight years with inexhaustible fried chicken and endless holidays of sunny idleness? Slavery by any other name would be far from hideous. Was it not, after all, merely an evangelical course in compulsory manual training and Christianity, mercifully designed for a benighted race whose souls could be reclaimed by no other means? These were the questions being asked by sentimentalists on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line. Nor were the abolitionists more eager to put their own houses in order before they set out to reform those of their neighbors. In attacking the plantation system they closed their eyes to the factory system, and to the exploitative basis of their own raw industrialism in which they confused wage labor with free labor. As Parrington has observed, it was the familiar story of the kettle and the pot. Blinded by sectional economic interests, each side saw only half the truth. "They beheld the mote in a brother's eye, but considered not the beam that was in their own."

It would be uncritical to assume that the bombardment of Fort Sumter demolished the stronghold of the sentimentalists. Not unlike Major Anderson and his Union forces, they evacuated their position with colors flying and with drums beating. In the age of critical realism which followed the Civil War, they continued to recruit their readers from those who persisted in clinging to myths, who refused to recognize reality, and who sought in fiction an escape rather than a challenge. Lutestring enthusiasts are not peculiar to any age, although they found in the first generation of the American middle class a comfortable habitat. Worse than uncritical, moreover, would be the easy assumption that these sentimental novels never rang true, that they sprang from impulses which were wholly false, and that they failed to reflect the aspirations quietly cherished in thousands of hearts. The enlarged heart of sentimentality is a disease to which those who readily respond to the appeal of human nature are peculiarly susceptible. It is the excess of a virtue, the perversion of an ideal. No student of our national letters can escape the conviction that ours is an idealistic literature, fired with a passion for justice, liberty, and brotherhood. The failure of the sentimental compromise should teach our critics that theirs is the task of guiding the creative spirit to face squarely the realities of American life without losing its high ideals. Although an unwitting one, this is the most important lesson these faded favorites of an earlier generation have for us today.

Mary P. Ryan

SOURCE: "The Tears and Trials of Domesticity: Women's Fiction in the 1850s," in The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830-1860, The Institute for Research in History and The Haworth Press, 1982, pp. 115-41.

[In the following excerpt, Ryan contends that the cult of domesticity, with its emphasis on mothers as the protectors of morality, linked the sentimental novel to the abolitionist movement.]

Most writers of the 1850s recorded only the routine discomforts of love and marriage. T.S. Arthur wrote in Home Lights and Shadows, "Oh, how dark the shadows at times, and how faint the sunshine" in the ordinary urban home.¹ In Married Not Mated Alice Carey wrote of the endurable but imperfect matches East and West. Grace Greenwood's light offering, Greenwood Leaves, recorded the bitter-sweet trials of domestic women:

It is one of my beliefs that every tolerably pretty maiden (present company excepted) who has arrived at the age of twenty and upwards, has known something like a disappointment of the heart.²

Greenwood's "heart histories" chronicled the commonplace anguish of her female acquaintances: unrequited love, deaths of grooms, marital misunderstandings, and, occasionally, a more exotic maladies, such as a groom's arrival at the altar to announce his marriage to the bride's sister.

Countless tears preceded the facile happy ending of a quiet domestic tableau. The most hackneyed and frequent causes of tears—lonely spinsterhood, unrequited heterosexual love, deviant sex roles, childhood nostalgia—fed off fundamental contradictions in the antebellum family system, especially its extreme gender asymmetry and the social isolation of the family. The cult of domesticity celebrated a logical and practical impossibility. It bred male and female into dichotomous roles and temperaments, then venerated their union and required their interdependence within an isolated home. The heterosexual tension was lodged at the very center of the domestic mode of social reproduction, and it cast a shadow over the empire of the mother. But it was the genius of this popular culture to inculcate domestic values and then provide, in the novel, an outlet for their expression and catharsis.

The torment of little heartaches and wholesale domestic disasters could not be disguised by a happy ending. They were, in fact, the substance and raison d'être of women's fiction in the 1850s. This literary genre did not aspire to some pristine aesthetic standard or to create an imaginary world of abstract beauty, symmetry, and order. Unlike the short family fiction of the 1830s and '40s, the domestic novel was more than an entertaining mode of instruction. The femininized novel of the 1850s was above all else a literary dramatization of the contradictions of the family and the gender system. It titillated readers with repeated images of the fears, annoyances, mundane anxieties, and cataclysmic possibilities of everyday domesticity.

All of this would have been benign enough were it not for the fact that the turgid logic of the cult of domesticity soon burst out of the confines of the novel and found its way into the turbulent center of American politics. Domesticity went on public trial in the 1850s as its tenets became intertwined with the issues of slavery and sectionalism. Popular fiction became a stormy courtroom where authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe argued the domestic merits of slavery, and Southern writers rose to defend the reputation of their families.

Thirty years earlier the discussion of slavery was primarily the prerogative of political and social elites. The intellectual agonies of men like Jefferson and documents like the Declaration of Independence had demolished the moral, political, and philosophical underpinnings for slavery. Yet these arguments were not circulated throughout the population by means of democratic associations or public podiums, much less novels. Several works of literature in the 1820s and '30s addressed themselves to the peculiar institution of the South. But most, like the rambling sketches of Southern life by John Pendleton Kennedy and Caroline Gilman and the stirring novels by Sarah Josepha Hale and Richard Hildreth, eschewed such staples of domestic fiction as romantic love, fragile femininity, and excessive maternal affection.³ It was the abolitionist polemicists of the 1830s who first invested the question of slavery with domestic sentiments.

When American readers glanced upon the first page of the Liberator in the 1830s they found its title nearly eclipsed by the sketch on its masthead; a graphic portrayal of a slave family about to be wrenched apart on the auction block. The verbal as well as the pictorial imagery of the Liberator cultivated a personal, domestic response. The poetic salutation in the first issue of the Liberator read:

Art thou a parent? Shall children be
Rent from thy breast, like branches from the tree
And damned to servitude, in helplessness,
On other shores, and thou ask no redress?

⁴

The abolitionist movement ingeniously exploited the same family anxieties that fed reform associations and ladies' magazines in the 1830s.

Elizabeth Margaret Chandler utilized this ploy as early as 1829, when she issued her "Appeal to the Ladies of the United States":

Mother, look down upon that infant slumbering by your side—have not his smiles become as it were a portion of your own existence? . . . Yet were it told to you that just when he was arisen into bold, glad boyhood, when his beautiful bright eyes began to kindle with awakening and early knowledge, when the deep feelings of his heart are beginning to gather themselves together—and reason and gratitude to mingle with his instinctive love—wert thou told then he should be torn from thee, and born away forever into hopeless, irremediable slavery—wouldst thou not rather that death should at once set his cold signet upon him, there where he sleeps in his innocent beauty in the cradle by thy side.⁵

Chandler created a sentimental device that became the mainstay of anti-slavery propaganda. She assumed that the American mother was bound to her child by the most exhaustive expenditure of affection, and that in the course of her gentle nurturing she would merge her own identity with his. When that child reached adolescence and set out on his own, the mother might well fear the breach of maternal ties just as her attentive care was bearing fruit. Chandler displaced this anxiety onto the slave child. This was the sentimental anti-slavery formula: the conversion of mundane apprehensions of domestic disruption into sympathy for the slave. Elizabeth Chandler, the anti-slavery analogue to Lydia Sigourney, wrote death-bed verse for the Liberator's Female Anti-Slavery column.

In the 1830s the potent combination of anti-slavery and domesticity caused widespread public consternation and exploded into anti-abolition riots and impassioned debates about women's proper sphere. In the wake of this controversy both abolitionism and domestic politics became relatively quiescent. It was not until the 1850s that the cult of domesticity became robust enough to sustain a new assault on the family life of the South.

In the two decades before the Civil War, as American editors and publishers unfurled the banners of motherhood and home, Harriet Beecher Stowe was acquiring the skills of domestic sentimentality. Her homiletic tales could be found in magazines from Godey 's to the Advocate of Moral Reform, and were quite indistinguishable from the general run of ladies' magazine material. When her brother, Henry Ward, suggested that her literary abilities be used to forward the cause of the slave, Harriet Beecher Stowe was happy to oblige. The factual and didactic treatments of slavery compiled by the abolitionists of the 1830s, and especially Theodore and Angelina Grimké Weld's Slavery as It Is, supplied copious and powerful images of domestic disruption in the slave quarter which she speedily translated into a novel. When Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in 1851 as a serial in the National Era, Stowe and the American public were ready, both having completed two decades of domestic education and experience.

Stowe pumped into Uncle Tom's Cabin a stream of evocative images drawn from the growing library of domesticity. She managed to weave all the themes of family literature—filial, parental, and conjugal anxieties—into one narrative. Stowe had polished the devices of domestic literature to perfection, painting dying children, anxious parents, and estranged lovers with a poignancy unrivaled in the literature of the period. The richness of detail and breadth of plot in the full-fledged novel allowed for the expression of cherished domestic values as well as innumerable domestic tensions. The anti-slavery novel provided a particularly convenient forum in which to portray familial disaster. In describing the villainous and alien institution to northern white readers, happy endings could be endlessly deferred; the suffering borne by black men and women could be described at length. The domestic disruptions of slave families were both dramatic enough and far enough removed from the experience of white middle-class Northerners to afford these readers an orgiastic domestic catharsis. No wonder, then, that Uncle Tom's Cabin became the most popular book of the nineteenth century, selling 300,000 copies in a year. Not even the pro-slavery forces were immune to Stowe's techniques; their novelistic rebuttals gingerly accepted her domestic premises.

By 1852 the American publishing industry had developed the marketing techniques and productive machinery to distribute Stowe's brew of domesticity and anti-slavery sentiments throughout the land. Moreover, not even sectional animosity and the possibility of losing half their customers deterred American publishers from obliging the domestic tastes of their readers. Stowe's proven popularity outweighed omens of disunion, especially since her expressed purposes were conciliatory to North and South. Northern-based publishers, including Harpers and Ticknor and Fields, readily distributed pro-slavery novels of proven domestic worth by Southern women such as Caroline Lee Hentz and Maria Mcintosh. These astute purveyors of public taste seemed confident that their sophisticated cultural system could absorb even the volatile issue of slavery.

Both the pro- and anti-slavery novels of the 1850s adopted the sentimental formula and the cult of domesticity wholesale. Each novel set out, first of all, to resolve the romantic difficulties of hero and heroine, and thus establish a home redolent with conjugal love. With white couples this was a simple matter, but infusing black characters with this sentimental notion often proved difficult, for pro- and anti-slavery writers alike. Both Stowe and the Southern apologist J. Thornton Randolph called on mulattoes to play the romantic lead among slaves. These authors also had some difficulty establishing sentimental filial ties among blacks. Again it was usually the mulatto mother who cherished the child in her arms. The mulattoes Charles and Cora of The Cabin and the Parlor represented the typical domestic tableau. "Oh! the bliss of that moment when the mother first feels another heart against her own. . . . The sight of Cora and his daughter was like sunshine on his [Charles'] soul."⁶

North and South were also in virtual agreement on their preferred child-rearing techniques. In fact, they often cooperated in rearing model children. The heroine of The Planter 's Northern Bride was called upon to gently instill discipline in the indulged child of her Southern husband. Aunt Ophelia, Stowe's paradigm of New England virtue, played a similar role in the upbringing of southern children in Uncle Tom 's Cabin. Pro- and anti-slavery authors also agreed on the angelic nature and redemptive power of such children.⁷ The tearful death of little Eva was reenacted at the pathetic deathbed of a planter's son by the slavery apologist, Randolph. Thus, affectionate methods of child-rearing, like romantic love, were values held in common by both the advocates and the enemies of the slave system.

Finally both North and South pledged fictional allegiance to the power and passivity of the mother. The white heroine, North and South, was submissive, meek, and self-sacrificing, armed only with loving smiles and gentle persuasion. These weapons were sufficient, however, to direct husbands along the path to virtue and the correct attitude toward slavery. The coupling of moral power and feminine weakness served as a convenient method of castigating social evil without encouraging overt rebellion. Aunt Phillus, Mary Eastman's pro-slavery answer to Uncle Tom, managed to overpower her shiftless and drunken husband, while she herself was totally compliant before the slave system, submissive to master, mistress, and Christian God.⁸ Stowe infused her heroines and, of course, Uncle Tom himself, with such feminine qualities. Eliza shuddered at George's defiance of his master, and discouraged his escape as well as any violent attack on the slave system. In the end, it was only the strength of her maternal instincts and the threat to her child that induced Eliza to brave the escape from slavery.⁹

All the novels of the 1850s upheld social peace and passivity, even while decrying the domestic monstrosities of both the slave system and industrial capitalism. Yet all the popular writers of the day, pro- and anti-slavery, had to expose the fragility of domestic ties and wrench families apart if they were to win the reader's empathy. By ascribing domestic infractions and failures to either North or South, novelists of the 1850s could not help but provoke or exacerbate sectional discord, and in the process transform the moral agency of women into a less benign and pacific influence.

In Uncle Tom 's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe charted the progressive disintegration of Southern family life. In order to create a domestic plot out of the issue of slavery, Stowe had to instill strong family loyalties in the slave population. Thus, the planter's wife, Mrs. Shelby, was called upon to teach the principal slave characters, Uncle Tom, Chloe, George, and Eliza, "the duties of the family."¹⁰ Yet this was a dubious service, for no sooner had she tied the domestic knot than her husband's economic straits induced him to sell Tom away from his wife Chloe. Tom then proceeded to the next scene of domestic disruption, the St. Claire household, where the corrupting effect of slavery upon the master's family was illustrated: he found a neurotic wife, weak husband, angelic but dying child, and the general disorder of a household operated by slaves. It was on this plantation that young Henrique St. Claire brutally whipped a slave companion, forcing his father to admit that "there is no doubt that our system is a difficult one to raise children under."¹¹ Even the sentimental deus ex machina, the deathbed wishes of the child Eva, could not prevent further domestic disintegration, and Tom proceeded to a third Southern household, the residence of Simon Legree. This was a burlesque of a home; its hearth was employed only to light Legree's cigars and heat his punch, not to warm the domestic circle. Herein was staged the most lurid episode of family disintegration, Legree's lecherous pursuit of both Emmeline, an innocent young girl newly torn from her mother, and Cassy, an embittered woman long deprived of her children. It was here also that Uncle Tom was finally rent from Chloe, by his death at Legree's hands. As Tom had been transported further South and deeper into domestic confusion, George and Eliza, on the other hand, had made their way North through a series of model domestic shelters.

The pro-slavery novels written in the wake of Uncle Tom's Cabin accepted Stowe's priorities and values, merely contending that Northern abolitionists were the cause of family disruption in the South, or that slavery provided more domestic security than did the industrial North. Caroline Hentz portrayed the Northern subversion of Southern domesticity in an incendiary guise. She pictured a Northern preacher ingratiating himself to a Southern family only to plot a slave insurrection. "We should like to ask him," she wrote, "if he has no home, no wife or child of his own, no household goods to defend, no domestic penetralia to keep sacred from intrusion."¹² Encouraging slaves to run away was another means by which Northerners reputedly disturbed the South's domestic peace. Hentz recorded the lament of one runaway:

Sometimes it was the voice of Jim saying, "Crissey, Crissey, I told you neber to run away, you'll never see poor Jim no more!" Sometimes they were the voices of little children crying, "Mammy, mammy, arn't you neber coming agin."¹³

By such literary devices the blame for Southern domestic instability was shifted to the North.

Slavery apologists did not hesitate, moreover, to cast aspersions on the domestic life of the North. In The Lofty and the Lowly, Maria Mcintosh described the family of the wealthy Northern merchant in which domestic values were sacrificed to the ambition of the father and the fashionable aspirations of the wife.¹⁴ The plight of the Northern wage-earner provided even greater sentimental possibilities, and no one exploited them more thoroughly than did J. Thornton Randolph. In The Cabin and the Parlor, Horace, the fragile son of a deceased planter, ventured north to win his fortune in order to support his mother and sister. The naive Horace took a position as an office boy, finding to his dismay that his wages never rose even to a subsistence level. As Horace lay on his deathbed crying for his mother, Randolph admonished his Northern readers, "You make slaves of white children, poor orphans, and work them to death. You promise falsely."¹⁵ Randolph also portrayed infanticide as a routine evil of the industrial North and inquired: "What must we think of that system which so brutalizes its victim that it destroys the natural instincts of the mother and makes her think more of a few shillings than of her child."¹⁶ Finally, Randolph noted less spectacular and more prevalent Northern modes of breaking up families.

The operation of your social system does it continually by compelling families to separate in order that they can live, sending a son to California or the Quinea coast, a daughter West to teach school, or a father to India to die of cholera.¹⁷

In sum, apologists for slavery fictionally ascribed domestic instability to the North by means of familiar themes: sentimental deaths, brutality, and routine economic exigency.

Such images captured a mass reading audience and even stirred the domestic sensibilities of New England matrons like Lydia Maria Child, Lydia Sigourney and Catharine Sedgwick. Sigourney wrote in the fall of 1860, "my dear friend, I feel so sad-hearted about the clouds in our Southern horizon." Sigourney's sadness blended politics and domesticity. She traced her allegiance to the national union to childhood tales about the patriotism of Washington heard at her father's knee. She appealed to her friends to wield their feminine weapons, prayer and the gentle persuasion of brothers and husbands, to save the beloved Union. Catharine Sedgwick's consciousness of the slavery issue was also enveloped in domestic sentiments. Her interest was aroused by the masculine heroism and feminine values of John Brown, his "high and holy motives," "a beautiful example in this materialistic age."¹⁸ John Brown's raid also sparked the domestic affections of Lydia Child, and rekindled her anti-slavery fervor. She was so touched by John Brown's heroism that she volunteered to be his personal nurse.

The reaction of these women to the slavery debates and sectional conflict of the 1850s illustrates the convergence of domesticity and politics. Sigourney, Sedgwick, and Child not only responded to politics as sensitive and maternal females, but with a strong sense of personal intimacy. In 1860 Lydia Child observed of the popular response to her anti-slavery writings: "More and more, I marvel at the interest people take in personalities. I take almost none in them, except where my affections are concerned."¹⁹ Yet Child's own anti-slavery resurgence was intensely emotional. Her affections became attached to utter strangers like John Brown, just as masses of readers attached their emotions to fictional slave families. Moreover, images such as the dramatic gestures of John Brown, or the matronly grace of Harriet Beecher Stowe helped spread and intensify sectional feelings. When Calvin Stowe reportedly engaged in a polite conversation with the anti-slavery laggard, President Pierce, Lydia Child exclaimed, "If I were his wife, I'd sue for divorce and take it if I couldn't get it by petitioning."²⁰ This kind of political response not only identified the anti-slavery cause with the actions of a popular literary figure, but also translated politics into a domestic conflict. This melange of politics, popular literature, and family affairs illustrates the centrality of domesticity in the national system of values, and the curious and powerful way mass culture was injected into individual, immediate, "real," experience. Residents of isolated homes attached their personal loyalties and affixed their anxieties to the poignant domestic images and dramas that the American cultural network circulated throughout the nation.

Popular literature did not, however, put forward any viable social or political remedies for the domestic evils it catalogued with such morbid delight. Harriet Beecher Stowe was not an advocate of the immediate abolition of slavery, nor was J. Thornton Randolph plotting the overthrow of the capitalist system. The practical goal of the novelist was primarily to escort heroes and heroines toward a happy ending. The pro-slavery writer strove only to abate the sectional conflict that disturbed the peace of Southern families, and often designed an intersectional marriage alliance for this purpose. Occasionally the novel's resolution incorporated a broader population in the happy domestic finale. The double wedding that concluded Mcintosh's The Lofty and the Lowly united the Southern hero to a Northern bride and a policy of benevolence toward his slave charges, while his Northern counterpart embraced a Southern wife and plans to build a Utopian community for the employees of his factory. Yet such extensions of family responsibility were as rare in fiction as they were in fact in the 1850s. Customarily only the white families and a few trusted house slaves, largely mulattoes, emerged from these novels in full domestic ideality, as custodians of their own nuclear homes.²¹

Once again Uncle Tom's Cabin set the formula for this denouement of domesticity. The masculine exertions of George and the maternal loyalties of his wife propelled their escape from the slave system and won them their domestic reward: "A small neat tenement . . . the cheery fire blazes in the hearth; the tea-table covered with a snowy cloth stands prepared for the evening meal."²² All this testified to Eliza's efficient home management, which enabled George to sit peacefully at his desk while his son was quietly at play. The hero of Stowe's second anti-slavery novel resided at book's end in a similar domestic refuge, a cozy farmhouse, where he reads to his son on a wintry evening. The ideal resolution of the tortuous plots of the slavery novels was simply the establishment of nuclear families, warm fortresses against the confusion and anonymity of the world outside. This resolution was reached, moreover, in the simple manner of a novel's plot, through the individual exertions of heroic characters without any intervening social policies or political decisions.

Writers who, by dint of gender, were steeped in domesticity, discouraged from intellectual exertion, and debarred from practical politics, often proved shoddy social theorists. The domestic argument constricted the oppression of slavery into the narrow vision of sentimental womanhood and contained neither a clear conception of freedom for the black man and woman nor a rational purpose for Civil War. The principle of human freedom stood on a shaky foundation of domestic priorities. Uncle Tom's Cabin subscribed to this definition of freedom:

The right of a man to be a man and not a brute; the right to call the wife of his bosom his wife, to protect her from lawless violence; the right to protect and educate his child; the right to have a home of his own, a character of his own, unsubject to the will of another.²³

Stowe rendered human rights nearly equivalent to the responsibilities of the model husband; freedom was submerged in domestic conformity. Moreover, this domestic construction of freedom left the female half of the population in the position of protected wife, rather like a child, and similar to the chattels of a benevolent master.

Didactic anti-slavery literature written by males often adopted this same interpretation of freedom. In his tract, "The Family Relation as Affected by Slavery," Charles K. Whipple, relying heavily on the writings of Frederick Law Olmstead and F. W. Higginson, selected slavery's degradation of the popular model of marriage as its greatest evil. This marriage is

A community of interest not less than of affection. .. . It is the obvious duty as well as the right of a husband to provide for the defense, and security, and comfort, and happiness of his wife, before those of any other human being.²⁴

Thus, for a female, the domestic rendition of freedom meant a protected, passive status, rather than control of her own existence. Black men fared no better than women of either race within this ethic. In Whipple's treatise the slave appeared primarily as a racial threat to the white family, a promiscuous example for pure women, a savage companion for angelic children.²⁵ The rights and dignity of black women and men were repeatedly obscured in the anti-slavery fiction of the 1850s, which abounded in portraits of sambo stereotypes dancing a jig, and favored mulattoes who assimilated the values and assumed the characteristics of white domestic heroes and heroines.

Moreover, the doctrine of domesticity sundered the more inclusive social organizations necessary to uphold human rights and to exercise human freedom. Whipple not only placed conjugal relations above the responsibilities to "any other human being," but also depreciated more extensive social ties. The last section of his tract, devoted to the "Bearing of Slavery on Society at Large," was very brief. Whipple simply stated:

But is not this question already answered? We have seen the effect of slavery upon the family; and society at large is but an aggregate of families. Doth a fountain send forth at the same time sweet water and bitter?²⁶

Whipple parroted the social theory that underlay the cult of domesticity. Individual family units could be relied upon to secure the common welfare and maintain social order. No intermediary institutions, no combination of critical citizens, no collective action by the oppressed, were necessary to ensure social justice.

These families, however, were prey to the values circulated by a centralized, profit-oriented publishing industry. This fountain of domestic values was spewing forth a bitter sectional brew by 1860. Even the gentle voice of Lydia Child rose to a shrill pitch in 1859. In a volume called The Patriarchal Institution Child's sentimental sympathy turned to sarcasm as she recommended the benefits of being a slave to her Northern reader: relief from domestic cares and expenses at the auction block, numerous opportunities for promiscuity, and the honor of having the master take your daughter as a mistress. The bitterness and personal immediacy of Child's tone were not likely to encourage sectional reconciliation.²⁷ It was in this atmosphere of outraged public opinion, with North pitted against South in angry defense of sacred domestic values, that the conflagration of Fort Sumter was ignited.

Surely the Civil War cannot be reduced to a by-product of domestic culture. But neither can it be fully understood without reference to the literary discourse which surrounded it and articulated and interpreted issues of slavery and sectionalism. When the United States came apart at its North-South seam in 1860, the national culture was still weakly woven together by the fragile threads of domestic ideology.

After three decades of sounding the alarm about the breach of family ties, writers and readers, North and South, had become accustomed to the language of domestic disruption and family tension. Domestic associations, symbols, and evocations had the ideological power to carry Americans toward Civil War. The most bitter trial of domesticity was conducted center stage, in the public sphere and on the battlefields of civil war.

Notes

¹ Timothy Shay Arthur, Homelights and Shadows (New York, 1853), p. iii.

² Grace Greenwood [Sara Clark], Greenwood Leaves (Boston, 1850), chap. 2.

³ Caroline Gilman, Recollections of a Southern Matron (New York, 1837), pp. 235-36; John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallowbarn (New York, 1851), pp. 461-90; Sarah Josepha Hale, Northwood (New York, 1852), pp. 121-22; William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee (New York, 1961); Richard Hildreth, The Slave (New York, 1836), vol. 1, p. 6; vol. 2, p. 9.

⁴The Liberator, 1, January 1, 1831, p. 1.

⁵ Ibid; The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Margaret Chandler (Philadelphia, 1837).

⁶ Thornton Randolph [Charles Jacobs Peterson], The Cabin and the Parlor (Philadelphia, 1852), pp. 124-25.

⁷ Caroline Lee Hentz, The Planter's Northern Bride (Philadelphia, 1851), pp. vii-viii; Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York, Colliers Paperback Edition, 1962), pp. 294-308.

⁸ Hentz, Planter's Northern Bride, p. 206; Maria Mcintosh, The Lofty and the Lowly (New York, 1852), pp. 5-6; Mary H. Eastman, Aunt Phillus 's Cabin (Philadelphia, 1852), passim.

⁹ Stowe, Uncle Tom, pp. 69-73.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 88.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 325.

¹² Hentz, Planter's Northern Bride, p. 457.

¹³ Ibid, p. 282.

¹⁴ Mcintosh, Lofty and Lowly, chap. 1.

¹⁵ Peterson, Cabin and Parlor, p. 241.

¹⁶ Ibid, p. 171.

¹⁷ Ibid, p. 180.

¹⁸ Lydia Sigourney to Mary Patrick, November 24, 1860, Sigourney Papers [Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter MHS)]; Catharine Sedgwick to Kate Minot, November 6, 1859, Sedgwick Papers MHS.

¹⁹ Lydia Child, fragment of letter, 1856, Loring Family Papers, [Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College (hereafter SL)].

²⁰ Child to Anna Loring, February 27, 1860, Loring Family Papers, SL.

²¹ Mcintosh, Lofty and Lowly, pp. 311-12; for a description of the wider networks among slaves, see Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York, 1976), especially chaps. 3, 4, 5.

²² Stowe, Uncle Tom, pp. 490-91.

²³ Ibid., p. 44.

²⁴ Charles K. Whipple, The Family Relationship as Affected by Slavery (Cincinatti, 1858), p. 13.

²⁵ Ibid., pp. 14-15, 20.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 23.

²⁷ Lydia Maria Child, The Patriarchal Institution (New York, 1860), pp. 50-52.

Amy Schrager Lang

SOURCE: "Class and the Strategies of Sympathy," in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels, Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 128-42.

[In the essay that follows, Lang contends that the sentimental novel displaces class issues by reducing them to race and gender issues.]

In 1851 the North American Review published a series of articles on political economy written by Francis Bowen, editor of the Review from 1843 until 1854 and, later, Alvord Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity at Harvard University. "There is a danger," Bowen wrote, "from which no civilized community is entirely free, lest the several classes of its society should nourish mutual jealousy and hatred, which may finally break out into open hostilities, under the mistaken opinion that their interests are opposite, and that one or more of them possess an undue advantage, which they are always ready to exercise by oppressing the others."¹ In the particular case of the United States, Bowen insisted, this mistaken opinion could only be held by those who failed to appreciate the "peculiar mobility" of American society. Today's pauper was, after all, tomorrow's merchant—"the man who labored for another last year," Abraham Lincoln declared, "this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him."²

This continuous displacement of master by man tended, in Bowen's view, to blur, if not altogether obliterate, the boundary between capital and labor. In fact, it was this very fluidity of boundaries that the term "class" was meant to capture; unlike "caste" or "rank," "class" identified the groupings into which all societies naturally divided, the way stations en route from pauperism to wealth. Properly considered—that is, considered not historically but ideologically—class antagonism would thus necessarily dissolve in a perfect harmony of interests.

While not everyone agreed with Bowen's analysis of class in America, he was hardly alone in his attention to social taxonomy and the operation of class. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, scholars, legislators, journalists, reformers, and writers of every political stripe ventured their opinions about the nature and ramifications of class in America. Harper's Monthly ran sketches of "The Factory Boy"; Democratic Review printed titles like "Poverty and Misery, versus Reform and Progress"; Merchant's Magazine and Commercial Review, Southern Quarterly Review, and North American Review devoted their pages to articles on "Abuses of Classification," "The Distribution of Wealth," and "The True Theory of Labor and Capital." Likewise, from the "Knights and Squires" of the Pequod to the fading aristocrats of the house of the seven gables, from the protagonists of domestic fiction, oppressed by the vicious poor and the dissolute rich alike, to Whitman's spectral "shape" rising from "[t]he ashes and the rags—its hands tight to the throats of kings," antebellum literature records the anxiety that accompanied the recognition and naming of class divisions in the United States in the years surrounding the European revolutions of 1848.

Not everyone, as I have suggested, shared Bowen's views. Nonetheless, while Europeans took to the streets, Americans increasingly promulgated and embraced images of harmony. Even as the extremes of wealth and poverty grew, as the women's rights movement gathered strength, and conflict over slavery intensified, the doctrine of the harmony of interests was expounded not only as economic theory but as spiritual principle. The consummate emblem of that harmony, bridging the economic and the spiritual, was the idealized middle-class home. If social mobility seemed to the likes of Bowen to assure a harmony of interests in the marketplace, the champions of domesticity saw in the stability of gender—that is, in the naturalizing and fixing of gender distinctions—the prospect of an even more perfect harmony. Like the vast, undifferentiated expanse of empire,³ the narrow and highly ordered space of the middle-class home operated to contain the danger of class antagonism by providing an image of social harmony founded not on political principles or economic behavior but on the "natural" differentiation of the sexes. Nowhere is this image more clearly drawn than in domestic fiction, where the problem of class is neither resolved nor repressed but rather displaced, and where harmony—spiritual, familial, and social—is the highest good.

The displacement of class by gender is peculiarly apparent in a novel like Maria Cummins's 1854 best-seller The Lamplighter, a novel that conforms in every respect to our assumptions about domestic fiction. Cummins follows her young protagonist, Gerty Flint, from a childhood of poverty and abuse into middle-class comfort, piety, and marriage. An orphan of mysterious parentage, Gerty has been left, more or less accidentally, in the charge of her vicious landlady. Filled with a sense of the injustice of her lot, Gerty is befriended early in the story by a sympathetic local lamplighter who promises to "bring her something." Gerty, who needs everything, speculates about what the "something" might be: "Would it be something to eat? O, if it were only some shoes! But he wouldn't think of that."⁴

And indeed, he doesn't. The "something" turns out not to be shoes but a kitten, a gift which leaves Gerty in a quandary. In the slum in which Gerty lives, the narrator mildly observes, "there were a great many cats" and, appealing though Gerty finds them, she knows "that food and shelter were most grudgingly accorded to herself and would not certainly be extended to her pets."⁵ Gerty understands all too well that pets are a luxury of the middle class; to the poor they are a burden, and so is the kitten to Gerty.

Nonetheless, the function of the gift is clear. The kitten elicits a maternal and self-sacrificing "tenderness" from the otherwise belligerent Gerty. It reveals her specifically feminine fitness to move out of her deprived and depraved surroundings. In fact, Gerty's affection for the kitten provokes the conflict with her slatternly and unfeeling guardian that leaves Gerty homeless—whereupon she is adopted by the lamplighter. The kitten, then, establishes Gerty's right to a home. Gerty joins the ranks of the worthy poor, where her schooling in self-control and the domestic arts commences immediately. Thus prepared, she rises eventually into the middle class.

In this brief episode, class is both superseded and made visible by gender. In lieu of the contingencies of history, Cummins offers the unchanging nature of women, incorporating maternal self-sacrifice, Christian forbearance, and innate gentility. No abstract or literary issue, the problem of class in The Lamplighter is a problem of material inequity; it is, literally, the problem of who does and who does not have shoes. But that problem is immediately tied to the matter of gender, which, on the one hand, serves as the lens through which substantial inequality becomes visible, and on the other hand, obscures its origin in class. The kitten and the shoes both imply and answer each other; to think about the kitten is to remember the shoes, but it is also to find a solution in kittens to the problems of bare feet.

The Lamplighter depends, in other words, on a strategy of displacement in which the language of class yields to the language of gender. The problem of poverty is not repressed but translated into a vocabulary that makes its redress inevitable: the distortions of poverty are answered by the naturalness of gender. Gerty stops breaking windows in retaliation for injuries done her, she exchanges rage for patience, the terms of her identity shift from poor to female, and she is awarded a home. Once gender is established as the source of social mobility and the guarantor of social harmony, the narrative focus shifts from social justice to individual reform, from deprivation to self-control.

Here, as elsewhere, what makes the erasure of class possible is not simply the fact that gender, like race, is deeply implicated in class status. Rather, gender and race are structurally able to substitute for class because the conjunction of attributes that define class position are rendered so intrinsic or else so transcendent that they pass either below or above history. As the contingency of social status is acknowledged, the potential for conflict becomes visible; conversely, that potential vanishes as the space between the attributes that are taken to constitute class and in which an explanation of their conjunction might be undertaken collapses. The doctrine of harmony, of which I would propose this is the literary analogue, subsumes difference into one harmonious whole by means of a kaleidescopic substitution of terms, terms which compose the social vocabularies in which writers and critics alike govern and recover meaning.

For the most part, nineteenth-century public discourse about class has been elided in discussions of the social reality in which antebellum literature takes its place. Moreover, class itself—the experience of differentials of wealth, power, and prestige—has gone largely unaddressed as subject or structure in that literature. Instead, heightened critical interest in the constructed nature of race and gender has tended, paradoxically, to direct attention away from class, itself a wholly contingent category. Gender and race are imbued with the determinants of class which becomes, then, the silent term in the class-race-gender triad. Or, alternatively, the broadly economic terminology employed by many New Historicist critics in an effort to demonstrate the complicity of texts in the culture of their production has subordinated the problem of difference to the structural identity of the text with hegemonic culture. In both cases, the recognition and the erasure of class are virtually simultaneous; recent scholarship is, in this sense, oddly consonant with the literature it describes.

My intent in this [essay] is to demonstrate that vocabularies of class, race, and gender continually displace one another in mid-nineteenth-century sentimental fiction, and to investigate the impact of those displacements on the success of sentimental representation. The Lamplighter serves as a kind of normative model, intended to suggest the social and novelistic benefits of this pattern of displacement for the propagation of a doctrine of harmony. The two texts on which this chapter focuses—Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills (1861)—diverge from this model not only in their structure but in their overt intent. In them, the commitment to social justice abandoned in The Lamplighter dramatically complicates the scheme I have described. In contrast to The Lamplighter, with its attention to the spiritual and social redemption of the individual, each of these texts treats the plight of a group of people—chattel slaves in one case and wage slaves in the other—for whom the prospect of mobility is closed, and each focuses on a protagonist whose gender identification is highly unstable.

In distinguishing her "primitive" method of storytelling from that of the novelist, one of the most popular sentimental writers of the mid-nineteenth century described herself as entering "unceremoniously and unannounced, into people's houses."⁶ Just so do we enter Uncle Tom's cabin in chapter 4 of Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous antislavery narrative. We are invited inside not by the occupants of the cabin but by the narrator, who has already taken us on a tour of the plantation house. "Let us enter the dwelling," she suggests, and in we go. While Aunt Chloe tends to the baking, the eye of the narrator pans the cottage, noting its various domestic arrangements and arriving finally at "the hero of our story," Uncle Tom himself, whom we are offered in "daguerreotype."

He was a large, broad-chested, powerfully-made man, of a full glossy black, and a face whose truly African features were characterized by an expression of grave and steady good sense, united with much kindliness and benevolence. There was something about his whole air self-respecting and dignified, yet united with a confiding and humble simplicity.⁷

The very fact that Tom is the subject of a portrait, albeit a photographic one, suggests, of course, that this is no "thing" but a man. Moreover, the identification of the portrait as a daguerreotype assures us of its fidelity not merely to the outward man but to the inner one—aspects of the self understood by sentimental culture to be inextricably connected. Like other features of Tom's representation, the daguerreotype operates to assure us of Tom's humanity.⁸

Equally striking, however, is the sureness of the artist's hand, her unhesitating ability to read Tom's character in his face. However exotic he may be—with his "truly African features"—Tom is no enigma. His blackness, the outward sign of his enslavement, is not opaque but, like a daguerreotype, a transparency through which his essential nature shines. Tom's condition as slave is, after all, only an accident of history; it neither obstructs our view of him nor does it, apparently, shape his character. He is as confidently drawn as any of the white planters, traders, mothers, or children in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

By contrast, when Rebecca Harding Davis introduces us to Hugh Wolfe, the working class "hero" of Life in the Iron Mills, the problem of literary representation and its adequacy arises immediately. The story of Life in the Iron Mills is a "simple" one. The hunchbacked Deborah, a picker in the cotton mills, is in love with her cousin Hugh Wolfe, a Welsh ironworker who does not reciprocate her feelings. Ignorant and inarticulate, Wolfe spends his idle moments at the foundry carving figures out of korl, a waste product of iron refining. One rainy night when she brings Wolfe his supper in the mill, Deborah witnesses a tour of inspection by the mill owner's son and several of his friends. Quite by accident, the visitors discover one of Wolfe's figures, "a woman, white, of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture of warning."⁹ One of the men—an aristocratic figure named Mitchell—comments on Wolfe's talent and on the impossibility of its development without money. Overhearing this, Deborah steals Mitchell's wallet containing a check for an enormous sum and gives it to Wolfe. Wolfe's first impulse is to return the wallet, but he is overcome by temptation. Arrested and sentenced to nineteen years in prison for the theft, Wolfe commits suicide. Deborah, after serving a much briefer prison term, is rescued by the Quakers and lives out her days in a neighboring community of Friends.

In sharp contrast to Uncle Tom's Cabin, when the narrator of Life in the Iron Mills sets out to introduce us to her protagonist, she is beset by difficulty. The narrator's view of the protagonist is obstructed, first, by a failure of vision itself. It is difficult, she observes, to see anything through the stifling smoke of the mills on a rainy day. But she is not only blinded by rain and smoke; her vision is impaired as well by the indistinctness of the object at which she is looking. Wolfe is one of "masses of men, with dull, besotted faces" (IM, 12), "myriads of . . . furnace-tenders" (IM, 14) any of whom might serve equally well as the object of her contemplation. In fact, the narrator herself does not know and thus cannot tell why she has chosen his story from all the others. The lives of the Wolfes are not individual but "like those of their class." Their "duplicates" are "swarming the streets to-day" (IM, 15). Davis has no trouble locating Wolfe in history—his own or the town's—or claiming him as a legitimate subject for her narrative. Rather, the problem is the portrait itself. While Uncle Tom can be rendered with all the fidelity of the daguerreotype, Hugh Wolfe apparently cannot be drawn at all.

Both Uncle Tom's Cabin and Life in the Iron Mills, published just nine years later, sketch "life among the lowly." Each was written by a white, middle-class, Christian woman in an effort to arouse compassion for the victims of an unjust economic system to which neither had direct access. The comparison of these systems—chattel slavery and wage slavery—was, moreover, a staple of the slavery debate. Predictably, apologists for Southern slavery insisted that the plight of the wage slave was far worse than that of the chattel slave, who at the very least was clothed and fed. In lieu of the "false, antagonistic . . . relations" of the market, George Fitzhugh argued, slavery interposed the natural relations of the family. Abolitionists like Stowe likewise expounded the relationship between these forms of enslavement, contending that chattel slavery was only "the more bold and palpable infringement of human rights" (UTC, 231).

Stowe's famous indictment of chattel slavery stands, arguably, as the apotheosis of sentimental narrative. Uncle Tom's Cabin successfully normalizes the chattel slave—that is, it offers the grounds for the slaves' prospective membership in the middle class—thereby providing the theological, political and, most crucially, emotional basis for emancipation as well as the promise of "another and better day" of Christian brotherhood. Of course Life in the Iron Mills also invokes "the promise of the Dawn," but, unable even to represent its subject, it is unable to move beyond it into the golden future. The chattel slave not only can be daguerreotyped; he can be, as Uncle Tom is, transfigured. By attending to his story, we can move beyond history to the fulfillment of the kingdom of Christ in America. The wage slave, on the contrary, remains enmired almost to the point of invisibility in the mud of a present, sinful world. One is forced to ask why Davis's figure of the wage slave resists so thoroughly the sentimental treatment to which the chattel slave all too readily lends himself.

We can begin to answer that question by looking at the ways in which Life in the Iron Mills violates our expectations. Hugh Wolfe, "stooping all night over boiling cauldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy" (IM, 12), is, by all rights, industry's victim, a martyr of the laboring classes—a Stephen Blackpool or perhaps a John Barton. We not only recognize his story, we anticipate the manner of its telling: the middle-class narrator who invites us to see "the romance" in the daily rounds of the Manchester mill hand or the American slave; the guide who, so to speak, familiarizes the lives of the lowly to the moral benefit of an all-comprehending reader and the social benefit of the oppressed. The tacit understanding is that the narrator's "lifelike" picture of how the other half lives, a picture both true and immediately apprehensible, will inspire our compassion as it did hers.

In Life in the Iron Mills, however, this sympathetic understanding is set aside from the outset. Accustomed to being invited into the story—"Let us enter the dwelling"—by a friendly narrator who resembles no one so much as ourselves, we are instead flatly shut out. "A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works?" (IM, 11). The question is not rhetorical but accusatory; clearly, we do not know what such a day in such a town is. "Dilettantes" in clean clothes who think "it an altogether serious thing to be alive" (IM, 12-13), we are repeatedly reminded by the narrator that we cannot possibly grasp the drunken jest, the horrible joke, that is the life of the ironworker. We are "another order of being" (IM, 27); between us and Wolfe lies "a great gulf never to be passed" (IM, 30). Egotists, Pantheists, Arminians all, we would rather busy ourselves "making straight paths for [our] feet on the hills" (IM, 14) than contemplate the "massed, vile, slimy lives" of people like the Wolfes.

Whereas the optimistic sentimental narrative ordinarily projects a sincere and highly impressionable reader from whose eyes the scales will fall upon being confronted with the truth, Davis's hostile narrator doubts even the willingness of her reader to come down into the "nightmare fog" where the mill workers live. This assault on the reader is, presumably, meant to dislodge us from our position of complacent indifference to the plight of the industrial worker. Self-regard, if nothing else, will lead us to disprove the narrator's charges against us by attending to her protagonist. But ultimately the story offers us no alternative position in which to locate ourselves. So blinded are we by middle-class privilege that we are, it would seem, incapable of useful intervention on behalf of the ironworker. And so brutalized is he by the conditions of industrial life that he too is unable to act. Chided into allying ourselves emotionally with the victims of industry, we nonetheless remain trapped in our own world.

No sooner, in fact, have we acknowledged both our reluctance and our ignorance and agreed to be instructed by the narrator, than we discover that she too is barred from the town. Standing at a window above the street, she can "scarcely see" the "crowd of drunken Irishmen" (IM, 11) idling away their time outside the grocery opposite. From the back window overlooking the river, her view is no better. But here the impediment is not the smoggy day but her own imagination, which associates the "dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden" with the "slow stream of human life creeping past" on the street. This "fancy" the narrator quickly dismisses as "an idle one." The river, figured as a chattel slave, is no "type" of the life of the wage slave, for its future "liberation" is assured: it flows eventually beyond the town into "odorous sunlight . . . air, fields and mountains." The "future of the Welsh puddler," by contrast, is "to be stowed away, after his grimy work is done, in a hole in the muddy graveyard" (IM, 13).

Brief—even casual—as it is, the association of chattel and wage slave in the figure of the river and the narrator's repudiation of that figure is instructive. What is most immediately striking, in this context, is its implication that the black, bowed though he is under the burden of slavery, is moving inexorably toward liberation—toward the sunshine. This is not, as I hope to show, just wishful thinking on Davis's part but consonant with a broader view of the nature of slavery among Northern whites. As important as the allusion to chattel slavery is, however, something less conspicuous but of equal importance happens in this passage: the association of the stream of life with the literal stream of the river is rejected as pathetic fallacy. Fancy, the artist's stock in trade, is shown, despite the narrator, to be not merely "idle" but actively misleading. In fact, the tendency of literary language throughout Life in the Iron Mills is to falsify.

The mills, for example, in which "crowds of half-clad men, looking like revengeful ghosts in the red light, hurried, throwing masses of glittering fire" (IM, 20), are early likened to a "street in Hell." And indeed, insofar as the mills are demonic places in which men are held in thrall to the "unsleeping engines" of industry, the comparison is evocative. Later in the story, however, one of the visitors to the ironworks reverts to this analogy, now casting it in the erudite language of the highly educated. "Your works look like Dante's Inferno," the aristocratic Mitchell comments to Kirby, the mill owner's son; "Yonder is Farinata himself in the burning tomb" (IM, 27). The allusion seems at first to have a salutory effect: it prompts Kirby to look "curiously around, as if seeing the faces of his hands for the first time." But if the point of the allusion is to intensify the real, to make us—or Kirby—feel more acutely the plight of the ironworkers, the reference to Dante fails, for Kirby replies, "They're bad enough, that's true" (IM, 27). This response, needless to say, misses the point—as does the association of the iron-worker with the sinful Italian nobleman. But what, after all, is the point? The appropriation of the real to the literary is, as Davis's narrator presents it, precisely a way not to see. By first rewriting the mill worker as Farinata, and then by dismissing him as "bad" and thus deserving of such an inferno, the visitors render the hands invisible. The allusion solves the moral problem that might otherwise be posed by the condition of labor in the mills, and allows the visitors to turn their attention to what really matters, the hard facts of industry—"net profits," "coal facilities," "hands employed."

The repudiation, if not the unmasking, of the literary is perfectly in keeping with the dictates of sentimental storytelling of the kind Uncle Tom's Cabin represents, with its commitment to the artless, lifelike tale. In a letter to her editor just prior to the publication of the first installment of Uncle Tom 's Cabin, Stowe outlined her intentions: "My vocation is simply that of a painter, and my object will be to hold up in the most lifelike and graphic manner possible Slavery." "There is," she continued, "no arguing with pictures, and everybody is impressed by them, whether they mean to be or not."¹⁰ Stowe's account of her vocation strikes the keynote of sentimental fiction. "Unpretending" stories written to move and instruct the middle-class family cozily gathered around the hearth, these stories were not, their authors insisted, properly "literature"—that deathlike form with "stony eyes, fleshless joints, and ossified heart" fit only for the library shelf.¹¹

This is not to say that the sentimentalist denied her invention. Despite her portrayal of herself as a painter who does not paint but only "holds up" the picture of slavery, Stowe explains in the preface to The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin that "[i]n fictitious writing, it is possible to find refuge from the hard and the terrible, by inventing scenes and characters of a more pleasing nature."¹²Uncle Tom 's Cabin may be "lifelike," but it is not a "work of fact." Quite the contrary, if her critics "call the fiction dreadful," she exclaims in an 1853 letter to the Earl of Shaftesbury, "what will they say of the fact, where I cannot deny, suppress, or color?"¹³

Stowe's two accounts of her role as artist are less contradictory than they at first appear. The lifelike tale told by the sentimental storyteller was no invention of a dissembling literary art. It was at once a story waiting to be told and a story everyone already knew—a kind of "found" art. And its claim to sincerity depended on its repudiation of the "literary." The novel, with its intricate plot and startling developments, substituted artifice for substance, erudition for feeling, author for subject. Sentimental writers embraced instead an ideal of self-effacing simplicity, of "naturalness." What allows Stowe simultaneously to claim artlessness and artistry, then, is a tacit agreement between the sentimental writer and reader that certain artifices will be accepted as "natural," and further that the "natural" will be understood to point toward the ideal.

In Life in the Iron Mills, however, the "simple" sentimental picture is rendered impossible by the inaccessibility of the mills to the middle-class narrator, "idly tapping on the window-pane" as if to draw our attention to the barrier that stands between her and the lives of those on the street below. But equally impossible is the self-consciously literary sketch of the kind Melville, for example, offers in "The Tartarus of Maids."¹⁴ If the first possibility is foreclosed by the narrator's inability to "enter the dwelling" of the iron-worker, the second is precluded by her inchoate recognition of the resemblance between economic and literary appropriation. She is no more willing to allegorize the mill worker than she is able to daguerreotype him.

In Life in the Iron Mills we are, in fact, in epistemologica! difficulty from the start. The narrator who demands that we "hide [our] disgust, take no heeds of [our] clean clothes, and come right down . . . into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia" (IM, 13) remains herself shut in the house. If we could "go into this mill," the narrator observes, we would surely discover there the "terrible tragedy" (IM, 23) of the mill worker, but this neither she nor we can do. The requirement that we enter the mill gives way to a far less strenuous request that we "hear this story." But of course we can only hear what the narrator can tell. And just as our narrator cannot enter the mills, so, she claims, she "can paint nothing" of the "reality of soul-starvation" that lurks behind the "besotted faces on the street" (IM, 23). Unable actually to enter or imaginatively to project herself into Wolfe's "dwelling," she can paint no "lifelike" picture.

Part of the problem is the ambiguity surrounding that "dwelling" itself. For Davis's mill workers, the central distinctions of middle-class culture are of no consequence. Home is no refuge, and labor is not productive but wasting. The cellar in which Wolfe lives is neither preferable to the mill where he spends most of his time nor, in a broad sense, any less its product than pig iron. Wolfe's "real" life—as worker and as artist—is led in the ironworks where, after laboring to transform ore into metal, he struggles in vain to transform industrial waste into art, to render the dregs of industry "beautiful and pure." But if Wolfe's home is "unnatural" by middle-class standards, so are all the other aspects of his life. For Wolfe, who labors at night and takes such rest as he can during the day, even time is inverted. And so too is gender: Wolfe's thin muscles, weak nerves, and "meek woman's face" belie his employment as an iron puddler and earn him the "sobriquet" Molly Wolfe.

Like Uncle Tom, then, Hugh Wolfe is a highly feminized figure—a figure, some have argued, for the female artist¹⁵—but the resemblance ends there. The feminization of Tom is part of a systematic attempt to invest slaves with piety, innocence, affection, and nobility of purpose—traits meant to assure white middle-class readers of the fundamental ethical and emotional identity of blacks and whites. Like Bowen's account of the false antagonism of labor and capital, Uncle Tom 's Cabin presents the differing interests of slave and slaveholder as illusory, a chimera of history. Tom's feminine qualities are central to his role as harbinger of the social and spiritual millennium to come. By contrast, the feminization of Hugh Wolfe is utterly debilitating; rather than providing grounds for his future success, Wolfe's feminine qualities ensure his demise. They make him physically and emotionally unfit for the only life he is likely to know. Like the disconcerting strength of the korl woman, the weakness of the feminized Wolfe heightens rather than diminishes our sense of the unnaturalness of his life.

But whereas Davis continually draws our attention to the distortions of industrial life—from the comfortless cellar to Deborah's hunched back—the logic of Uncle Tom 's Cabin directs us to see lives of the slaves as versions of our own. The slave quarters, for example, are as much the outgrowth of a particular system of economic exploitation as the tenements of the mill workers, but Tom's cabin is nonetheless presented to us not as a hovel but as a veritable bastion of domesticity. Only the easy intrusion of whites—slaveholders, traders, and narrators—into the cabin reminds us that, for the slave, there is no private life. In both Uncle Tom's Cabin and Life in the Iron Mills, then, the separate spheres of men and women, work and family, are compromised, but in one we witness the doomed but insistent efforts of the chattel slave to restore the boundary between these, while in the other, normalcy— the social arrangements of the middle class—are beyond the imagination as well as the capacity of the characters. Unlike Chloe and Tom, neither Deborah nor Wolfe, for all their discontent, sees the middle class as imitable.

Having located her characters in a wholly alien world, it is not surprising that the narrator of Life in the Iron Mills can offer only the "fragments" of a story, the "outside outlines of a night" (IM, 23). By contrast, the narrator who so unceremoniously enters Uncle Tom's cabin is, so to speak, in full possession of her subject. Uncle Tom, after all, belongs quite literally to middle-class whites like herself—and her reader. This is not to suggest that Stowe did not mean to extend a full humanity to her slave characters; nevertheless, the central concern of Uncle Tom's Cabin—the transformation of a "thing" into a "man"—implies a plasticity that lends itself to Stowe's literary as well as her political purposes even as the form of representation she invokes—the daguerreotype—paradoxically hints at a deathlike fixing of its subject. The literal appropriation of the labor of slaves, in other words, facilitates their literary appropriation by the white artist.

Without rehearsing the arguments of the slavery debate, it is fair to say that, in that debate, the issue of slavery was as often as not subordinated to the question of the nature of blackness. For proponents of slavery, race served to naturalize the subordinate status of blacks. For others like Stowe who argued that racial difference was not sufficient to justify slavery, blackness nonetheless stood as a paradox. On the one hand, the black, dispossessed of himself, could be "owned," both actually and symbolically, by others. On the other hand, the black was taken to be profoundly unknowable, altogether unlike his white owner. Inscrutably black, essentially Other, and powerless to represent himself—legally or literarily—the American slave could, for these very reasons, be freely represented by the free white writer whose possession he was.

My point is not simply that, as Other, the slave was a blank screen on which the white writer could project any image she pleased. It is rather that blackness is widely understood in the mid-nineteenth century as a state of becoming. Even among the defenders of slavery, who insisted on the natural and therefore permanent "semi-civilization" of blacks, the question arose of what blacks would become over time, living among whites.¹⁶ For romantic racialists like Stowe, the un-tapped potential of blacks was one of the most pressing arguments against slavery. Like the children (all of them girls) with whom he is continually associated, Uncle Tom is in the process of becoming—in Tom's case, becoming a Christian and ultimately a martyr, but in the case of other black characters, becoming independent, industrious, educated, prosperous, or pious. Like Alexander Kinmont, who claimed that blacks were destined to develop "a later but far nobler civilization" than that of whites, or William Ellery Channing, who saw in blacks "the germs of a meek, long-suffering, loving virtue,"¹⁷ Stowe's narrative projects a rosy future in which the enslaved black emerges as free, Christian, and altogether respectable. Leaving aside Stowe's patronizing tone, that future is intimated from the outset by Uncle Tom's cabin, which—from its neat garden patch to the carpeted corner that serves as "drawing room" and the "brilliant scriptural prints" that decorate its walls—resembles nothing so much as a playhouse in which the life of middle-class adulthood is being rehearsed.

The prophetic mode of Stowe's narrative depends on the plasticity of its object, the black slave, and that plasticity, in turn, is a central feature of the developmental schemes used by whites to understand both the present and the future of the victims of chattel slavery. As yet unmade, the black could be molded to the artist's liking. In fact, he could be cast, as he is in Uncle Tom's Cabin, more or less in the image of his white creator. What is reflected here is not the sentimentalist's "ability to confuse the natural and the ideal"¹⁸ so much as her willingness to reimagine the real as a type of the ideal. The success of Uncle Tom's Cabin depends on the narrator's capacity to project in fully realized form the man who lurks in the "thing" and, on the basis of this projection, to call for his emancipation. Insofar as it draws out the human potential, defined as the potential for middle-class respectability, in those whose full humanity is in doubt—the black or, more commonly, the poor and unruly orphan girl—sentimental narrative is oriented always toward the future¹⁹ and, I would suggest, toward the home where differentials of class are most conspicuously inscribed.

Unlike the infinitely malleable Uncle Tom, however, Hugh Wolfe must be "hewed and hacked" out of the recalcitrant korl—the industrial waste that is both his sculptural medium and his matter—by a narrator who questions the capacity of literary language to make his story "a real thing" to her resisting reader. The object of the narrator's regard in Life in the Iron Mills is not the man in posse but the man the industrial world has already produced, the man with no future. Fixed in an interminable present, inarticulate, uneduated, born "in vice," "starved" in infancy, stained in body and soul, Wolfe is, so to speak, already completed—or rather, finished.

The irony is obvious, for Wolfe, unlike Uncle Tom, is free, white, and male. He is not legally bound to the mills; he is, as we say, master of his own destiny. As Doctor May, one of the visitors to the mill, complacently remarks, "you have it in you to be a great sculptor. .. . A man may make himself anything he chooses. . . . Make yourself what you will. It is your right" (IM, 37). A free agent by right, Wolfe is nonetheless represented as entirely the product of his circumstances, a figure not of human potential but of human waste.

But he is also, of course, a figure of the artist. The argument for Wolfe's humanity lies not in the man, dumb and brutelike, but in the korl woman, whose "wild, eager face, like that of a starving wolf's" (IM, 32) is, like the starving Hugh Wolfe, incomprehensible to the jeering Kirby and the complacent Doctor May. Nor can Wolfe explain it. Only the aristocratic Mitchell sees "the soul of the thing," but he sees it with an eye "bright and deep and cold as Arctic air," the eye of an "amused spectator at a play" (IM, 36). The korl sculpture, the tragedy of the furnace tender, the "rare mosaic" he examined that morning, and, we must assume, the peculiar institution of the South that he has come to the border state to "study"—these are to him as one. The narrator of Life in the Iron Mills must defend her subject not only against the Kirbys who would deny his soul and the genial Mays who would deny his plight but also, most crucially, against the tranquil gaze, the reified consciousness, of the Mitchells who see in Wolfe an "amusing study"—all of these, it must be added, versions of both narrator and reader.

Needless to say, the vehemence of the narrator, her inversion of the usual narrative stance, her insistence on the failure of narrative and her own inadequacy, are all calculated for effect. She does, after all, tell her story and more. As she herself admits, the "tiresome" story of Hugh Wolfe hides a "secret" that she "dare not put . . . into words," a "terrible dumb question" that is, paradoxically, "from the very extremity of its darkness, the most solemn prophecy . . . the world has known of the Hope to come" (IM, 14). The question—"Is this the End?"—is articulated only twice: once in the poetic epigraph that opens the story and again, at it close, by the korl woman.

Complicit though art may be in the system of capitalist exploitation, only art, it turns out, can speak the terrible question and reveal the prophecy. Wolfe is mute, but his sculpture is invested with the power of speech. The "pale, vague lips" of the korl woman "tremble" with the terrible question (IM, 64). Wolfe cannot be figured, much less transfigured, but the korl woman is touched by the "blessing hand" of the "Dawn" (IM, 65), just as Deborah, named after the Biblical prophetess, is later touched by the Quaker woman.

Prophecy, both social and religious, fails in Life in the Iron Mills because in the end art has been made to substitute for life after all. That is to say, prophecy fails because the narrator has made us acutely aware not only of the distance between the artifice, the story or the sculpture, and the Truth, the "reality" of Hugh Wolfe's "soul-starvation," but also of the inevitable tendency of art to appropriate the life of its subject, the mill hand, just as the mill owner appropriates his labor. Thus when we learn of Deborah's transformation at the hands of the Quakers in a "homely pine house, on one of these hills" overlooking "broad, wooded slopes and clover-crimsoned meadows" (IM, 63), we realize that we are being asked to accept the pathetic fallacy of the river after all. Likewise when the narrator attempts, at the close of the story, to represent the truth of Hugh Wolfe's futile life as a higher one, the transcendent truth of "the day that shall surely come," we resist; the narrator has, in effect, taught us too well. Fully persuaded that the ironworker lives and dies in the mills only to be replaced by his duplicate, that his aspirations will always be thwarted by the conditions of industrial life, we believe that he is America's future, that he will no more disappear than the wheels of industry grind to a halt; he prefigures not the millennium but, we suspect, the apocalypse.

Insofar as wage slavery is taken to be a necessary concomitant of industry, it is irremediable and, like the mills themselves, inescapable. But chattel slavery, by contrast, could be abolished, and that without endangering the nation. For Stowe's narrator, slavery is not just a sin but an anachronism and an aberration. The remnant of an altogether un-American seignorialism, it belongs to the feudal past, not to the democratic future. As George Harris's invocation of the American Revolution implies, slavery constitutes a falling away from the very ideals on which the nation was founded. Emancipation, in Uncle Tom 's Cabin, does not threaten but guarantee the future of America; in fact, emancipation alone will avert the wrath of God and secure America for the millennium. Moreover, emancipation not only must but can be accomplished. Although the narrator goes to some lengths in Uncle Tom's Cabin to demonstrate the complicity of the North in Southern slavery, she understands the effects of emancipation as local and short-term. Once possessed of "property, reputation, and education" and all the advantages of "Christian republican society," the emancipated slaves can be returned to Africa to put into practice "the lessons they have learned in America" (UTC, 449).

If one were to credit their titles alone, to go from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Life in the Iron Mills is simply to go from home to work. At the imaginative center of Stowe's narrative is the family home: its affectionate ties are the story's ideal, its disruption a sin, its absence the sign of an unredeemable evil. Uncle Tom's "real" life is led in his cabin, surrounded by his wife and children. An ideal site, the cabin thus can serve, at the end of the narrative, as a "memorial," pointing back to slavery, a death in life, and forward to emancipation, a life after death.

In establishing the emotional grounds for the identification of her middle-class reader with the slave, Stowe's narrator invests her black characters with the virtues they will, she assures us, come to have once free. In this sense, Uncle Tom fuses hope and destiny. Like their middle-class counterparts in antebellum America, the slaves in Uncle Tom 's Cabin live "suspended between the facts of [their] present social condition and the promise of [their] future."²⁰ And just as the middle-class American was thus plagued with anxiety concerning his own social identity, so too was he plagued with anxiety over the "true" nature of the black. Arguably, in that anxiety we can read the demise of slavery. The sentimentalist's "monumental effort to reorganize culture from the woman's point of view"²¹ is not, that is, without its class bias; in fact, the achieve-ments of sentimentalism depend on its reorganization of culture from the point of view of the parlor, the "cultural podium" of the white middle-class woman.

The drive to impose the forms of the future on the present, so apparent in Uncle Tom 's Cabin, is stymied in Life in the Iron Mills, where all forward movement is blocked by the combination of inadequate narrator, unwilling reader, and mute subject. As the English industrial novel suggests, even where home is a cellar with a pile of rotting straw for a bed, where "real" life is stooping over a cauldron of boiling metal all night, it is possible to project a future millennium in which masters and men, Christians all, unite. But it is possible only by an act of appropriation. With an irony that eludes its unselfconscious narrator, Uncle Tom's Cabin appropriates the black slave—an embodied object, a "thing" waiting to be claimed—in the interest of ending his appropriation by others. This irony is the stumbling block for the narrator of Life in the Iron Mills. Rejecting all modes of representation as forms of appropriation, refusing to pretend to know her subject just as she refuses to let her reader pretend to know what a cloudy day in an iron mill town is, she exposes the artless "scribbling women" and the erudite literary men—Stowe and Melville alike—in their truest character, as members of the possessing class.

Yet like them, she must find a way to tell her story. Freeing her eyes to see the promise of the dawn in the nearly impenetrable darkness of her story, she falls victim to the common fate of the reforming artist. Having refused to take possession of her human subject, she is, in the end, the uneasy possessor of the korl woman, the only remaining evidence of Wolfe's existence. Uncle Tom's Cabin ends with the inevitable transfiguration of Tom's homely dwelling into the symbolic site of liberation; Life in the Iron Mills ends, inevitably, as it began. Just as Hugh Wolfe is rendered invisible by the smoke of the mills at the beginning of the story, so at the end the visible, tangible figure of the korl woman, "a rough, ungainly thing," painful to look at, is kept hidden behind a curtain in the narrator's library.

The representational quandary posed by class is answered by recourse to gender as surely in Life in the Iron Mills as it is in Uncle Tom's Cabin (or, for that matter, in The Lamplighter), but the literary and political consequences for the story are altogether different. For Stowe, slavery is the testing ground of middle-class culture. The success of Uncle Tom's Cabin depends on the placement of the chattel slave in a developmental scheme which makes immanent his middle-class character and thus brings him, provisionally at least, into the world of the reader. The virtues of that world are measured, in turn, by its capacity to assimilate to itself both slave and slaveholder. The developmental scheme that governs the representation of slaves in Uncle Tom's Cabin, in other words, not only lends itself to the millennial hopes of the narrator, but also implies an absolute standard of value against which everyone and everything can be measured.

In Davis's grim account of industrial life, on the contrary, the shifting vocabularies of class and gender expose the limits of middle-class sentimental culture. At the end of Life in the Iron Mills, we are returned to the domestic world of the middle-class narrator which, unlike the satanic mills, "belongs to the open sunlight." But that world—a world in which vision is ostensibly restored—is one in which mill workers become once again invisible, a world from which darkness is banished, and in which epistemological problems are solved by faith. Having placed the wage slave out of sight of that world and beyond the ameliorative influence of genteel reform, Davis is left with only a morally equivocal art to mediate between the sunlit world of her middle-class reader and the gloom of the mills. Class cannot be dismissed as obscuring a deeper "human" reality, nor can it be dissolved into race or gender. Rather, class stands as irreducible to the end, and art—suspect from the first—emerges as the real subject of Life in the Iron Mills.

Notes

¹ Francis Bowen, "Philip's Protection and Free Trade, "North American Review 72 (1851): 415.

² Quoted in Wai-chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 18.

³ I am thinking here of Wai-chee Dimock's argument in Empire for Liberty that the "expansionist social discourse of antebellum America" is characterized by the "spatialization of time" (15). This argument is, of course, a version of Myra Jehlen's thesis in American Incarnation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

⁴ Maria Cummins, The Lamplighter (Boston, 1854), 11.

⁵ Ibid., 12.

⁶ Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 3.

⁷ Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852; New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 68. Hereafter cited in the text as UTC.

⁸ The democratizing of portraiture—part, surely, of Stowe's point in choosing the daguerreotype as the form for Tom's representation—began with the publicizing of Daguerre's process in 1839. As other critics have suggested, the long exposure time required by daguerreotypy not only produced a deathlike rigidity in the features of the subject but made the dead the perfect subject. Nathaniel Hawthorne exploits this idea in the portraits of the Pyncheons in The House of the Seven Gables—as he does the notion that the daguerreotype exposes the truest, most hidden nature of its subject.

⁹ Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills (1861; Old Westbury, N. Y.: Feminist Press, 1972),31. Hereafter cited in the text as IM.

¹⁰ Quoted in Eric J. Sundquist, New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 9.

¹¹ Fanny Fern in Rose Clark, quoted in Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 33. Susan Warner insisted that her 1850 bestseller The Wide, Wide World was no "novel" but only a "story." Likewise, Fanny Fern refused to "dignify" Ruth Hall by calling it a novel.

¹² Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853; New York: Arno Press, 1969), v.

¹³ Ibid., vi.

¹⁴ "The Tartarus of Maids" deploys erudite, "literary" language from the start: Melville's narrator passes through a "Dantean gateway" into a gorge called the "Devil's Dungeon," where the paper mill is located. As horrified as Davis's narrator by the exploitation he witnesses there, Melville's narrator has no difficulty in seeing or recounting what he sees—even when what he sees is his own complicity in the exploitative practices of the mill.

¹⁵ See, for example, Maribel W. Molyneaux, "Sculpture in the Iron Mills: Rebecca Harding Davis's Korl Woman," Women's Studies 17 (1990): 157-77; Jean Pfaelzer, "Rebecca Harding Davis: Domesticity, Social Order, and the Industrial Novel," International Journal of Women's Studies 4 (May-June 1981): 234-44; Tillie Olsen, Biographical Interpretation, Life in the Iron Mills (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1972), 69-174.

¹⁶ George Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), especially 51-58.

¹⁷ Quoted in Frederickson, Black Image, 106-7.

¹⁸ Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 83.

¹⁹ As Elizabeth Ammons, Jane Tompkins, and others have argued, Uncle Tom is both infantilized and feminized. Likewise, as Jean Pfaelzer has suggested, Hugh Wolfe—whose "sobriquet" is "Molly Wolfe" and whose representative is the korl woman—is both a feminized character and a figure for the female artist: "Rebecca Harding Davis: Domesticity, Social Order, and the Industrial Novel," International Journal of Women's Studies 4 (1981): 234-44. In conjunction with my own, this line of argument suggests that one way to lend "plasticity" to the otherwise intractable mill worker was to associate him with women who, like chattel slaves, were understood by sentimental writers to be infinitely malleable subjects.

²⁰ Halttunen, Confidence Men, 192.

²¹ Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 124.