Table Of Content“AM I MY OTHER’S KEEPER?”:
ALTERITY, DIALOGIC REPRESENTATION AND POLYPHONIC ETHICAL DISCOURSE
IN LATER ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN FICTION
By
Stephen Andrew Gaertner
A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
English—Doctor of Philosophy
2015
ABSTRACT
“AM I MY OTHER’S KEEPER?”:
ALTERITY, DIALOGIC REPRESENTATION AND POLYPHONIC ETHICAL DISCOURSE
IN LATER ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN FICTION
By
Stephen Andrew Gaertner
Hayden White argues that to create a narrative is to “moralize.” As historicists assert, the
moral content of a narrative reflects the social, cultural and political discourses in which it is
constructed as well as the ethical value systems that such discourses contain. However, context
does not reveal the entire story. Mikhail Bakhtin holds that narratives are polyphonic, that is,
they contain multiple, competing discourses, at times represented through singular idiolects. But
what are these various voices talking about, and to whom? Polyphonic or “carnivalesque”
narratives rehearse and contest contrasting ethical paradigms, exposing their discursive limits as
well as their transcendent possibilities in a given milieu. Thus, the text manifests the emergence
of a dialogic exchange between ethical discourses, the yield of which is a creative destabilization
that that resists the archaeological confinement of time, place and ideology.
Therefore, I engage an ethical formalist rereading of a selection of antebellum narrative
fictions in order to probe the discursive possibilities latent within the texts’ moral imaginaries.
In addition to deploying Bakhtin’s work on polyphonic narrative, I use Emmanuel Levinas’
ethical theory of alterity that stresses the moral agent’s duty to respond on behalf of an
individualized subject otherwise totalized by an oppressive, thematizing discourse. Whereas
Levinas describes the moment of this ethical demand as the face-to-face encounter, I argue that
the responsive duty suggested by the instance of inter-subjective recognition is represented
within fiction as dialogue, in addition to the more subtle discourses that the narrator adds.
Beyond exposing the text’s ethical tensions, these dialogic moments reflect the discursive
polyphony theorized by Bakhtin, multi-vocal eruptions often signaled by a perichoresis of
distinct idiolects.
The works I discuss—James Fenimore Cooper’s Littlepage Trilogy, Herman Melville’s
Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno,” Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig—all
contain ethical discourses elaborated through idiolectical dialogic structures and polyphony.
Furthermore, the context of their production—the late-antebellum United States—situates them
within ethical conversations on totalization and interpersonal duty for the Other in that the
modernizing republic was struggling with the moral implications of Indian removal, African
slavery, urban labor, poverty and gender oppression.
Yet, a Levinasian reading of antebellum U.S. literature invites looking beyond
ideological power discourses. In addition to reflecting how American republicanism and
capitalism of the mid-1800’s totalized, confined and dehumanized disempowered Others, these
texts evidence rhetorical ambivalence respecting the status of the differentiated Other and the
moral subject’s duty to the Other in a capitalist republic obsessed with categorical ordering and
uncomfortable with ambiguity. Despite their concerns with political, social and ethical
regulation, though, these polyphonic works contain transcendent ethical counter-discourses on
duty and Otherness that expose a symbiosis between radical Others, peoples otherwise divided
by contrasting ethical, political, cultural, racial or socioeconomic alignments.
Copyright by
STEPHEN ANDREW GAERTNER
2015
For Fr. Joseph Serrano, O. Praem. who inspired the completion of this project,
for the Norbertine Community of Santa María de la Vid Abbey that supported it,
and for the Zimmerman Library staff at the University of New Mexico who made it possible.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1
I. Levinas………………………………………………………………………………...2
II. Bakhtin………………………………………………………………………………...8
III. Historical Context……………………………………………………………………14
IV. Overview of Chapters and Primary Texts…………………………………………...21
CHAPTER 1: Historicizing an Ethics of Otherness: Dialogism and Ambivalent Constructions of
Duty in James Fenimore Cooper’s Littlepage Trilogy…………………………………………..26
I. Satanstoe……………………………………………………………………………..44
II. The Chainbearer……………………………………………………………………..56
III. The Redskins…………………………………………………………………………76
CHAPTER 2: The Ethics of Confinement: Race, Class and Labor in Herman Melville’s Israel
Potter and “Benito Cereno”.……………………………………………………………………..98
I. Israel Potter………………………………………………………………………….110
II. “Benito Cereno”……………………………………………………………………..133
CHAPTER 3: Alterity, Compassion and Ethics: Female Antagonists as Sympathetic Others in
Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig…….……………………………….163
I. Ruth Hall……………………………………………………………………………172
II. Hybrid Archetypes………………………………………………………………….193
III. Our Nig……………………………………………………………………………..200
CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………....220
WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..226
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INTRODUCTION
Hayden White argues in The Content of the Form that “narrativity, certainly in factual
storytelling and probably in fictional storytelling as well, is intimately related to, if not a function
of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source
of any morality that we can imagine” (14); in short, to create a narrative is to moralize. As
White and other historicists suggest, the moral content of a narrative reflects the social, cultural
and political discourses in which it is constructed; like an archaeological artifact, the text speaks
to its immediate surroundings, and the ethical value systems that inform them. But a narrative’s
socio-historical context does not reveal the entire “story.”
Mikhail Bakhtin holds that narrative texts are “polyphonic,” that is, they contain multiple,
competing discourses (Murfin and Ray 86), at times represented through the construction of
singular “idiolects” (Richter 548). This sort of idiosyncratic, discursive interplay is what makes
them interesting! But what are these various voices talking about, and to whom? Polyphonic or
“carnivalesque” narratives (Holquist xix), in particular fiction—creative prose provides rich
rhetorical terrain for the moral imaginary—rehearse and contest contrasting ethical paradigms,
exposing their discursive limits as well as their transcendent possibilities in a given milieu.
Thus, the text manifests dialogic exchanges between ethical discourses, the yield of which is a
creative destabilization of comprehension that opens up a broader horizon regarding hidden or
latent meaning(s) that resist the archaeological confinement of time, place and ideology.
In this dissertation, I explore representations of the ethical imagination and the concept of
interpersonal response to the Other within antebellum narrative texts from the northeastern
1
United States. On a formalist plane, I am interested in how the suggestion and depiction of
dialogue within polyphonic narratives undergird and destabilize larger understandings of social
economy, authority, personal responsibility, interpersonal moral obligation and the rhetorical
mechanisms for regulating ethical behavior on the antebellum American scene. I also investigate
how these notions are translated within narratives into a greater preoccupation regarding
individual invocation, and how this sense of personal duty places a moral demand on textual
subjects at times in accord with conventional notions of social order, authority and responsibility,
but also at times in conflict with them. This vocational tension as manifested within certain
works of northeastern American fiction from the mid-1800’s opens up a dynamic, discursive
public space of competing moral paradigms, and points not only to the definitive political rupture
to occur in the U.S. in 1861, but also to an ethical imperative for citizens and communities to
delineate what constitutes the Good and therefore the individual agent’s moral responsibility for
a differentiated Other. I will explain this crucial ethical concept of Otherness, or “alterity” in
Emmanuel Levinas’ wording, before moving on to its critical application to my textual analyses
and the overarching sociopolitical, historical context that informs the works I examine.
I. Levinas
In Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas defines the “particular” Other (73) in
opposition to the Selfsame “I” as an individualized, unique subject, separate from the Self, and
one whom the Self often attempts to objectify and appropriate. He writes:
The other metaphysically desired is not “other” like the bread I eat, the land in
which I dwell, the landscape I contemplate, like, sometimes, myself for myself,
this “I,” that “other.” I can “feed” on these realities and to a very great extent
satisfy myself, as though I had simply been lacking them. Their alterity is thereby
2
reabsorbed into my own identity as a thinker or a possessor. The metaphysical
desire tends toward something else entirely, toward the absolutely other. (33)
This notion of the “absolutely other” here is key, for it delineates that which cannot—or ought
not—be “reabsorbed” or “totalized” by or into the Selfsame—the “I”—who seeks to control,
possess and render “like” the absolutely or particularized Other. Levinas explains in Alterity &
Transcendence that “‘[t]otalization’ may be understood to mean either the grouping of objects or
of points in a whole, or the intellectual operation by which that multiplicity of objects or points is
encompassed. […] The true function of totalizing thought does not consist in looking at being,
but in determining it by organizing it” (39-40, 47). A “totality,” then, is an organizing
systematization “in which all Other is included in the Same” (56). It is here where Levinas’
notion of alterity moves from the abstract to the distinct and interpersonal, and therefore to the
realm of “ethical relation” (97). He continues:
to see the infinite in the suppression of the Other or in reconciliation with him
assumes that the Other is, for the Same, nothing but limit and menace. Who
would dispute that it is so…in a human society subjected, like all finite reality, to
the formal principle according to which the other limits or cramps the same: the
wars and violence of the world, of all ages, is sufficient proof of that. But the
other man—the absolutely other—the Other [autrui]—does not exhaust his
presence by that repressive function. His presence can be meeting and friendship,
and in this the human is in contrast with all other reality. (56)
He then explains the primacy of ethics as the omnipresent responsibility—or “duty” (105)—of
the Selfsame “I” to strive for this particular Other’s “right to well-being” (146), as opposed to
attempting, often via language, to reduce this Other to a dehumanized type, a part of a totality of
3
genericized beings who, as a result of their systematized generality, are now assimilated within
the dominant hegemonic discourse:
In the relation to the other, the other appears to me as one to whom I owe
something, toward whom I have a responsibility. Hence the asymmetry of the I-
You relation and the radical inequality between the I and the being toward whom
I have obligations. I insist, therefore, on the gratuitousness of the ‘for the other,’
resting on the responsibility that is already there in a dormant state. The ‘for the
other’ arises within the I, like a command heard by him… […] The person for
whom one is responsible is unique, and the one who is responsible cannot
delegate his or her responsibility. […] In that relation to the other, there is no
fusion: the relation to the other is envisioned as alterity. (101, 102, 103, emphasis
mine)
Here I pause to emphasize that within the scope of my textual analyses, I will deploy the words
“Other” and “Otherness”—to offset the importance of these words, I capitalize them—in two
ethical senses. One refers to Levinas’ notion of the non-totalized, unique Other for whom the “I”
is always responsible. The second—and this is key—is the Other, the person different from the
Selfsame “I” who has been inscribed within a given “thematizing” (123) or totalizing discourse,
that is, one who has been absorbed, assimilated into a type-category and who comprises in part
the unaccounted “third party” Other in Levinas’ ethics, or the “other” Other, the totalized person
to whom one chooses not to respond on a moral plane.1 In those portions of the project where I
1
Levinas explains in Alterity & Transcendence: “Alterity’s plot is born before knowledge. But that apparent
simplicity of the relation between the I and the You, in its very asymmetry, is yet again disturbed by the arrival of
the third person, who stands next to the other, the you. The third party is also a neighbor, a face, an unattainable
alterity. […] Here, with the third party, we have the proximity of a human plurality. Between the second and the
third person, there can be relations in which one is guilty toward the other. I pass from the relation in which I am
obligated to the other, responsible for the other, to one in which I ask myself which is first. I ask the question of
justice: Which one, in that plurality, is the other par excellence? How can one judge? How to compare others—
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Description:of a dialogic exchange between ethical discourses, the yield of which is a creative CHAPTER 1: Historicizing an Ethics of Otherness: Dialogism and
