Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (America and the Long 19th Century)

312 Pages·2010·3.54 MB·English

by  James Salazar

Bodies of Reform
America and the Long 19th Century
general editors
David Kazanjian, Elizabeth McHenry, and Priscilla Wald
Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor
Elizabeth Young
Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits,
and the Legal Culture of Travel
Edlie L. Wong
Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: U.S. Imperialism
and the Problem of the Color Line
Gretchen Murphy
Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America
James B. Salazar
Bodies of Reform
The Rhetoric of Character
in Gilded Age America
James B. Salazar
a
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org
© 2010 by New York University
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Salazar, James B.
Bodies of reform : the rhetoric of character in Gilded Age America /
James B. Salazar.
p. cm.—(America and the long 19th century)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8147-4130-6 (cl : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8147-4131-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8147-4132-0 (e-book : alk. paper)
1. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Character
in literature. 3. Characters and characteristics in literature. 4. National
characteristics, American, in literature. 5. Character—Political
aspects—United States—History—19h century. 6. Rhetoric—Political
aspects—United States—History—19th century. 7. Political culture—
United States—History—19th century. 8. Politics and literature—United
States—History—19th century. I. Title.
PS374.C43S36 2010
823'.809353—dc22 2010019202
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the
greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
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A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative
publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers
University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia
Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: “The Grandest Thing in the World” 1
1 Philanthropic Taste: Race and Character in
Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 36
2 Character Is Capital: Manufacturing Habit in
Mark Twain’s Character Factory 63
3 Muscle Memory: Building the Body Politic of
Character in Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the
National Police Gazette 112
4 “A Story Written on Her Face”: Pauline Hopkins’s
Unmaking of the Inherited Character of Race 157
5 Character’s Conduct: Spaces of Interethnic Emulation
in Jane Addams’s “Charitable Effort” 204
Notes 243
Index 285
About the Author 301
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Acknowledgments
Character has proven to be a strangely cumbersome, yet also
intangible, topic of study. Pivotal in so many diverse texts and discourses
of the nineteenth century and yet the express subject of so few, character
seemed to be both everywhere and nowhere, easy to see yet difficult to
understand. Fortunately, I have had the guidance and inspiration of many
supportive friends, colleagues, and teachers in developing this study. I
would first like to thank my colleagues at Temple University for their gen-
erous support as I worked on the final stages of the manuscript. I am par-
ticularly grateful to Miles Orvell, who unflinchingly gave much time and
energy to reading entire drafts of the manuscript and who helped guide
the project to its final completion with excellent advice on direction and
scope. Discussions with Peter Logan on the discourse of fetishism in the
nineteenth century, and his useful feedback on chapter drafts, have also
helped me to keep the historical and theoretical ambitions of this project
in balance. Steve Newman, Dan O’Hara, Eli Goldblatt, Shannon Miller,
Sue Wells, and Larry Venuti have also provided many useful comments
and insights on the project at many stages, and fellow Americanists Kate
Henry, Michael Kaufmann, and Oliver Gaycken have exposed me to new
archives and perspectives on the nineteenth century that have enriched the
book immensely. Jena Osman, Sue-Im Lee, Suzanne Gauch, Rachel Blau
DuPlessis, Patricia Melzer, and Lisa Rhodes have also provided the kind
of intellectual community that has been invaluable to the development of
my ideas on the project and to keeping my sanity through its completion.
Thanks as well to Carolyn Karcher for her support and guidance on bring-
ing the work to publication.
Beyond Temple, a number of people have supported my work in many
incalculable and all too painfully calculable ways. Gillian Harkins and
Edlie Wong have been unfailing friends and indispensable readers of the
manuscript over the long course of its development, and I owe them a
vii
viii Acknowledgments
very special thanks. David Kazanjian has encouraged the project at many
critical moments as well. Participants in the Haverford Faculty Work-
ing Group in American Studies have also provided excellent feedback on
the project and stimulated my thinking in many ways, particularly Tina
Zwarg, Homay King, Bethany Schneider, Jean Lutes, and Heather Hicks.
Special thanks to Gus Stadler and Susan Ryan for their incisive readings
of the manuscript and astute suggestions toward revision. Detailed dis-
cussions with Christopher Lukasik, Mark Feldman, Corey Capers, How-
ard Horowitz, and Christopher Diller on different aspects of the book
have also been immensely valuable. And Masha Raskolnikov, Dale Car-
rico, and Catherine Zimmer have been sustaining interlocutors from the
very beginning and good friends throughout.
A number of scholars have helped give the project its shape at some of
its earlier stages, particularly Nancy Ruttenburg, Stephen Best, Stephen
Hartnett, Felipe Gutterriez, Charles Altieri, and Trane Devore. Jill Berg-
man, Debra Bernardi, and John Bryant have provided much editorial
guidance on particular chapters, and Bill Brown has been a gracious sup-
porter of the project in its early stages and reader of some very early sec-
tions. Carole Blair helped clarify the importance of classical and modern
rhetorical theory to the aims of the project as well. I am particularly grate-
ful to Judith Butler, Donald McQuade, Sam Otter, and Shannon Jackson,
who helped give shape and inspiration to the project in its formative stage.
I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Judith Butler, who has been a gener-
ous reader and an unflagging supporter of the project throughout its de-
velopment, and who seemed to know exactly when to put up the guard
rails and when to let me roam. Donald McQuade has helped shape the
contours of the project as a whole and guided me through the intricacies
of my own writing, and for that I am very thankful. Without Samuel Otter
this project would be a very different, lesser thing. Sam has enabled me to
see the project more clearly against the broader landscape of nineteenth-
century U.S. literature and culture and has given me advice on particular
chapters and the arrangement as a whole that have been absolutely indis-
pensable. Shannon Jackson’s knowledge of the archive and ability to see
thematic and conceptual connections between the chapters have been
enormously helpful, and to her I owe many thanks. I am also enormously
grateful to Michael Rogin, who in early readings and conversations helped
to give shape to the project and whose own work has been such a guide to
my own. He’ll always be sorely missed.
Acknowledgments ix
A number of institutions have supported the development of Bodies of
Reform. Summer Research Awards and a Faculty Study Leave from Tem-
ple University helped me to complete much of the research and writing
of the final manuscript, and a Junior Faculty Grant from the Office of the
Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at Temple enabled me
to conduct research on physical culture at the New York Public Library.
A fellowship from the Center for the Humanities at Temple University
helped me to refine different aspects of the final chapters, as did the dis-
cussions of the project with other members of the fellowship group, par-
ticularly Hillary Dick, Richard Immerman, and Elizabeth Varon. Early
work on the project was also completed with the assistance of a University
of California Dissertation-Year Fellowship. Thanks to the Dartmouth Col-
lege American Studies Summer Institute, where I presented on portions of
the manuscript, and to Elizabeth Maddock Dillon for her comments and
Donald Pease for his support. Eric Zinner and Ciara McLaughlin at NYU
Press have also been invaluable guides through the intricacies of the pub-
lishing process. Thank you to the graduate students in my seminars on the
rhetoric of character, fetishism and the imagination, and the nineteenth-
century child for stimulating my thinking in so many ways and to Ni-
cole Cesare for her excellent assistance editing portions of the manuscript.
And I’m grateful as well to the New York Public Library, University of
Delaware Special Collections, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Cen-
ter at the University of Texas at Austin, Connecticut Historical Society,
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and University of Illinois at Chicago
Library Special Collections for their help tracking down difficult sources.
Portions of chapter 1 have been previously published as “Philanthropic
Taste: Race and Character in Melville’s The Confidence-Man” in the jour-
nal Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and portions of chapter 5 have
been previously published as the essay chapter “Character’s Conduct: The
Democratic Habits of Jane Addams’s ‘Charitable Effort,’” in Our Sisters’
Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women,
ed. Jill Bergman and Debra Bernardi (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2005). Thank you to Wiley-Blackwell, publishers of Leviathan, and
the University of Alabama Press for permission to use this material.
Finally, I’d like to thank Amze Emmons, Josephine Park, and James
Ker for their sharp wit, fine meals, and scholarly acumen and Betty, Jim,
and Mac Holton for their sustaining support through some of the tough-
est stages of completion. Special thanks to my ever patient and supportive