Race and Time: American Women's Poetics from Antislavery to Racial Modernity

Race and Time

RACE AND TIME American Women’s Poetics from Antislavery to Racial Modernity By Janet Gray

U n i ve r s i t y o f I owa P re s s I owa C i t y

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2004 by the University of Iowa Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Design by Omega Clay http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. Excerpts from “Publication–is the auction” and “The Malay–took the pearl” by Emily Dickinson are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and fellows of Harvard College. The publication of this book was generously supported by the University of Iowa Foundation. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gray, Janet Sinclair, 1948– Race and time: American women’s poetics from antislavery to racial modernity / Janet Gray. p. cm. isbn 0-87745-877-4 (cloth) 1. American poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Race in literature. 3. Literature and history—United States—History—19th century. 4. Women and literature—United States—History—19th century. 5. American poetry—19th century— History and criticism. 6. Antislavery movements in literature. 7. African Americans in literature. 8. Race relations in literature. 9. Slavery in literature. I. Title. ps310.r34g73 2003 811'.3099287—dc22 2003060383 04 05 06 07 08

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii

I • Introduction 1 1. Wrappings A Methodological Introduction 3 2. Contesting the Pearl Whiteness, Blackness, and the Possession of American Poetry 33

II • Antebellum 61 3. “Skins May Differ” Women’s Republicanism and the Poetics of Abolitionism 63 4. The Mummy Returns Humor, Kinship, and the Bindings of Print 86

III • Postbellum 101 5. Looking in the Glass Sarah Piatt’s Poetics of Play and Loss 103 6. We Women Radicals Frances Harper’s Poetics of Racial Formation 127 7. What One Is Not Was Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert’s Poetics of Self-Reconstruction 146 8. Critical Positions in Racial Modernity An Approach to Teaching 168

IV • Other Times: Childhood and Nonsense 183 9. The Containment of Childhood Reproducing Consumption in American Children’s Verse 185

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Appendix: Poems Cited 235 Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, The Kneeling Slave Sarah Louise Forten, An Appeal to Women Frances E. W. Harper, The Slave Mother

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237 238

Hannah Flagg Gould, The Slave Mother’s Prayer

240

Hannah Flagg Gould, The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy 241 Sarah Piatt, A Child’s Party (in Kentucky, A.D. 185_) 242 Frances Harper, Aunt Chloe

246

Mary Eliza Perine Tucker Lambert, Loew’s Bridge, a Broadway Idyl 260 Anonymous, The Three Little Kittens Sarah Josepha Hale, Mary’s Lamb

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281

Mary Mapes Dodge, Shepherd John 282 Mary Mapes Dodge, The Way to Do It Hannah Flagg Gould, Apprehension

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284

Mary Mapes Dodge, The Wooden Horse

285

Hannah Flagg Gould, The Butterfly’s Dream

286

Mary Mapes Dodge, The Mayor of Scuttleton 288 Lizzie W. Champney, How Persimmons Took Cah ob der Baby 288 Notes

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Works Cited Index 321

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Acknowledgments

I ’ve d re a m e d of a three-hundred-page acknowledgments section accompanying a ten-page book, but that would be another story. A. Walton Litz showed me the door out of high male Modernism and into the hushed sepulchers of dead white women poets. Elaine Showalter pointed me toward several passages, one of which led directly to my previous book, She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. The research staff at Firestone Library helped me illuminate obscure corners. U. C. Knoepflmacher nurtured my enthusiasm for nineteenth-century women’s poetry and pored over countless pages, urging them to speak. Deborah Nord showed me shadowy women on nineteenth-century streets, falling out of or breaking into modernity. Bill Gleason joined me on a porch when I was puzzling about poetry and racial modernity and coaxed bridges across the gaps. Pat Crain woke a late burst of joy in my hunches, and Juda Bennett and Michael Robertson offered discipline to my retrospective sensemaking. The teachings of Cathy Davidson, Jonathan Freedman, Diana Fuss, Sandra Gilbert, Allan G. Johnson, John Shoptaw, Andrew Ross, and Bryan Wolf echo through these passages. In the three-hundred-page acknowledgments, chapters would be devoted to teachers from longer ago, especially Mrs. Buggs, who let me be the Ghetto Witch in the school play. I exchanged energies with companions, as one says, “too numerous to list.” John Whittier-Ferguson read like a dream reader and led me into historical trauma. Ruth Bonner showed me how earlier academic women patrolled the fortresses of English. Deborah Meadows taught me about teaching. Paula Bennett has been a parallel universe. With Molly Weigel and Bill Piper, I hauled forgotten heritages out to the lawn. I turned to Bruce Simon and Lee Talley because I knew they would know if I had something.

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In the unpredictable convalescence from beginning a life of scholarship, there are those who simply stick with you. My sisters Marie Cashion and Bobbi Gray repeatedly bought the story that I was writing a book and carried on as if that were normal. My stepson Brandon Mahlberg swapped thoughts with me about race, writing, and difference. Robert and Gladys Gray have been my other New Jersey, the wide, generous ground reaching away from narrowness. And George Mahlberg: artman, byteman, nonsense, and first reader. Special thanks to the people at the University of Iowa Press for their patient welcome, and to the press’s readers for their generous grasp of my aims, and to Gail Zlatnik for her joyful companionship into the last summer of the journey. And thank you, the College of New Jersey, for money to finish this book.

I • INTRODUCTION

1 Wrappings A Methodological Introduction

Wh y re a d p o e m s by nineteenth-century American women through the constructs “race” and “time”? I saw race and time at work on each other in a group of poems I chose for She Wields a Pen (1997), one of several collections through which feminist scholars made freshly available the works of long-forgotten women poets as the turn of the twenty-first century approached.1 In the earliest of the poems in my anthology that touch on race, a child interrogates a naturally mummified corpse that the American Antiquarian Society put on display in Massachusetts early in the nineteenth century. The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy And now, Mistress Mummy, since thus you’ve been found By the world, that has long done without you, In your snug little hiding-place far under ground— Be pleased to speak out, as we gather around, And let us hear something about you! By the style of your dress you are not Madam Eve— You of course had a father and mother; No more of your line have we power to conceive, As you furnish us nothing by which to believe You had husband, child, sister, or brother. We know you have lived, though we cannot tell when, And that too by eating and drinking, To judge by your teeth, and the lips you had then; And we see you are one of the children of men, Though long from their looks you’ve been shrinking.

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Who was it that made you a cavern so deep, Refused your poor head a last pillow, And bade you sit still when you’d sunken to sleep, And they’d bound you and muffled you up in a heap Of clothes made of hempen and willow? Say, whose was the ear that could hear with delight The musical trinket found nigh you? And who had the eye that was pleased with the sight Of this form (whose queer face might be brown, red, or white,) Trick’d out in the jewels kept by you? —Hannah Flagg Gould (1836)

“The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” met several of the criteria that guided my effort to create an anthology that would stretch the boundaries of how we understand “women,” “poetry,” and “American.” It represents an oddly distorted female figure, anticipates the nineteenth-century blossoming of nonsense verse, and tackles a feature of people’s relationship to the landscape that poetry in English had not confronted before its migration to North America. The poem’s silliness delighted me, especially since I found it amid page after page of serious little poems that fit more neatly into past and recent efforts to define a tradition of nineteenthcentury American women’s poetry. And I saw myself in it; I saw a likeness between the child’s interrogation of the mummy and the musty adventure in recuperative scholarship that led me to the poem. But the parenthetical reference to race bothered me. Gould published antislavery poetry, but the child’s uncertainty about the mummy’s color seemed to mark the limits of Gould’s critical understanding of race. In a tricked-out, “brown, red, or white” female figure, I saw the makings of the racially ambiguous and sexually aggressive Jezebel stereotype, a social myth rooted in the justification of slavery that still undergirds discriminatory public policy.2 And what of the maternal meaning of “mummy”—was Gould’s child an ironically shriveled and inaccessible version of a Kentucky mammy? Nervousness about race together with gender seemed almost to be the poem’s destination, the repressed worry it had to get out, the puzzle toward which its poetics drove it. Why? And why invest that anxiety in a mummy, a body whose living took place in an indistinct past? Further, what if we understand the Kentucky mummy not as a marginal quirk but

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as somehow central to the experience of being an American woman writing poetry—or rather a white woman writing poetry in nineteenth-century New England, a condition often treated as “the tradition” in recuperative scholarship on American women’s poetry? Gould’s poem pointed me toward a thesis for this book and a methodological framework for the questions I needed to ask. I offer a full reading of the Kentucky mummy in chapter 4; in this introductory chapter, I explore the framework for my methods, engaging in theoretical debates and drawing on theoretical resources I would not have reached for at the beginning of my work on this project. My guiding thesis was that the dynamics of racial identity infused American women’s poetry; more specifically and more ambitiously, that the changing constructions of whiteness and blackness across the temporal divide of slavery’s end should help account for the formation of the poetics of modernity. Exploring this thesis meant not taking for granted that poetry is a field with its own internal rules and values, even that the forces of modernity would make poetry such a field. It meant instead demonstrating how poetry’s relative engagement with or disengagement from the wider world is an artifact of many interacting circumstances, particularly those surrounding the structuring of raced identities along an axis of time. These circumstances and how poems show them to us are what subsequent chapters explore. I call my methodology a poetics of race and time. It calls attention to the investment of the lyric impulse in objects such as Gould’s mummy. Lyric poetry, as Sharon Cameron puts it, captures the poet’s effort to stop time and examine a frozen moment.3 The lyric may be resisting death, as Gould’s young speaker does in pressing a corpse for answers; but death is generously available as a figure for events in the social world that we do not have “the power to conceive”—for the losses and possibilities that emerge from actual or envisioned historical change. The shock of becoming aware of difference, in other words, may come masked as death. The defining condition of historical modernity is a widespread awareness that the present is unstable, that we are moving into a future that differs from the past. Cultural tropes that represent a struggle against mortality may also represent a struggle against disruptions that the movement of time brings. But poetry cannot evade time; it must use temporal resources to articulate its resistance. The objects it produces in its efforts to freeze time show traces of the world it resists; they take form in the bound-

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ary between non-time and time. Read critically, then, a figure like Gould’s stiffened stereotype-in-the-making works as a courier between the making of poetry and the making of the historical category of race. As is often true with impassioned immersions, late in the writing of this book I discovered more of what it is about. I saw stereotypes of black women—Jezebel, Sapphire, and especially Mammy, the oldest of these images4—forming and reforming everywhere in the text, as if to remind me there was knowledge waiting to be recognized beyond the limits of my present critical understanding. Writing the last pages, I found myself considering Carrie Mae Weems’s charge, speaking of her series of photographs that capture myths about black women, “We must learn to love our stereotypes.” How would I, a white woman, honor that charge? To “love” the stereotype I saw in Gould’s mummy (Gould’s stereotype? mine?) meant for me to stay with the unknowing and, beyond that, the uneasiness about race that is built into “being white.” This book, then—although I did not know it until late in the search—is about my finding a place from which to speak about race. Mammy’s emergence from my text reminded me of what cannot be erased. The chapters offer supports for my thesis, but the most sweeping argument for the critical importance of race in understanding the cultural work of nineteenth-century American women’s poetics comes from studies of the African diaspora. Race matters in American women’s poetry because slavery underlies the production of every field of human activity that characterizes Euro-American modernity. Frozen into sexual roles that justify the use of black female bodies to reproduce racial oppression through time, Jezebel, Sapphire, and Mammy linger as reminders that the actuality of the historical processes of race cannot be abolished. This book then is also about critical practice, its powers and its limits. For all we might do to deconstruct race, to expose its lack of essence, the historical experience of race does not go away—not from the past, not from the present. Critical methods can expose how race gets made in its historic forms, but only as a kind of formalist fantasy does that exposure reduce race to an idea that has no use. The object of critical inquiry into race, as Himani Bannerji points out, is not to render it invisible but to produce knowledge that is usable in the transformation of oppressive systems5—which brings me to a new way of valuing Gould’s investing her mummy with nervousness. Her child speaker has an inkling that the mummy had a race and, perhaps, that her race mattered not only to her

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lived experience but to the child’s own. Rather than dismiss race, critical methodology must help us stay with the discomfort of confronting it while we unwrap its stories. In addition to Gould’s mummy poem, for this book I chose to look closely at three postbellum poems that I selected for She Wields a Pen, all of which cross backward over the temporal divide of emancipation to explore the raced and gendered construction of subjectivity. Sarah Piatt’s “A Child’s Party (in Kentucky, 185_)” suited the anthology’s aims because it exhibits an awareness of whiteness as a constructed racial identity that I saw nowhere else in the sources I reviewed. Among the many poems by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper that met my criteria, I chose “Deliverance,” the longest poem from the cycle “Aunt Chloe,” because it links the antebellum and postbellum periods in a continuous narrative—as nothing else I selected does—through the first-person narrator’s testimony about the emergence of individual and communal black identities from slavery to emancipation to reconstruction. I selected excerpts from Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert’s book-length Loew’s Bridge, a Broadway Idyl (1867) for the interest of its form, a pastiche of satire and sentimental lyric, and because it offers a view of urban modernity. Lambert approaches race evasively: she pictures herself only once, in the antebellum South rather than the postbellum North, and (although Loew’s Bridge was reprinted in Collected Black Women’s Poetry) surrounds her self-representation in the language of whiteness. I came to see these three poems as representing three different ways that women poets negotiated racial modernity. James Brewer Stewart defines racial modernity as a “reflexive disposition” on the part of the preponderance of whites “to regard superior and inferior races as uniform, biologically determined, self-evident, naturalized, immutable ‘truths’—and, the development of integrated trans-regional systems of intellectual endeavor, popular culture, politics and state power that enforced uniform white supremacist norms as ‘self-evident’ social ‘facts.’”6 A broader view of racial modernity would include the strategies that people of color as well as white people undertook—the articulation of ideas, the making of culture, the building of institutions—to resist white dominance or to make space for vitality despite its constraints. Harper’s minimizing emancipation in the temporal arrangement of her poem called my attention to the fictiveness of treating emancipation as a radical historical divide. As the set of material

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historical processes that separated the justification of racial inequality from the official structure of slavery, beginning well before emancipation and arguably continuing today in postmodern forms, racial modernity constitutes the social dynamics around which nineteenth-century American women shaped poetry’s relationship to the wider world. In other words, to embellish my original thesis, the interacting material circumstances that a nineteenth-century poet faced in shaping her degree of engagement with or disengagement from the wider world were those circumstances that characterize racial modernity. Consideration of the fictiveness of a singular divide between “present” and “past” led me to see how a poetics of race and time, particularly applied to women’s poetry, also concerns the historical construction of childhood and the coinciding development of nonsense as a mode of juvenile literature. Gould seems to forecast this convergence of categories in her mummy poem, speaking in the voice of a child about an unburied other from the past, while Piatt and Lambert both engage in a temporal gesture that flourished in postbellum plantation literature: crossing backward, from adulthood to childhood and from a world without slavery to one with slavery, to recover the stuff of childhood. Disengaged from the richness of their histories, the stuff of plantation life becomes stereotypes. But it is also nonsense, full of information about the instability of social categories and the possibilities for their disruption, or the prospects of their adaptation to the changing forms of social inequality. The linkages among the construction of childhood, race, and poetry make stereotypes children’s play. Lyric Time, Raced Time, and the Poetics of Everything People Do My method builds on a double definition of poetics: poetics is the theory of literary making, most narrowly the terms for defining and ranking kinds of poetry, and, most broadly, the theory of how textual discourses are constructed. I situate poems amid historical and cultural contingencies, looking for interactions between the strict and general senses of poetics, for relationships between the making of poetry and the discursive formation of social categories. My method is deconstructive, in the sense in which Himani Bannerji summarizes deconstructive method. She urges critics to show, through the interplay between subjective experience and external reality, “how the social and the historical always exist as and in ‘concrete’

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forms of social being and knowing,” the making of a poem being an instance of what she is describing. “Everything that is local, immediate and concrete,” she continues, “reveals both its uniqueness and its species nature, that is, its homology with, or typification of, the general.”7 Her methodology corresponds with Bourdieu’s description of how people reproduce unequal social structures: by transferring among disparate institutions and fields of practice, from the marketplace to poetry, for example, by reproducing in their practical strategies the homological tissues of deep social myths, such as the myths that sustain racial modernity.8 It is these processes that criticism is to expose. T. V. F. Brogan objects to the broader usage of poetics, noting that, in recent decades, the term “poetics” has been “applied to almost every human activity, so that often it seems to mean little more than ‘theory.’”9 But “poetics” has gone wayward during precisely the period when recuperative scholarship on women’s and minority literatures has helped to unsettle the theory of poetry. The formalism that dominated Western critical practice for much of the twentieth century resisted placing poetry amid “almost every human activity.” Questions about form and, underlying them, about ethos, the poet’s presence as a forming mind, dominated discussions of poetic value. The poetics through which poetry gained canonical status by the mid-twentieth century emphasized universality—transcendence of historical particulars. Scholars of women’s and minority literatures have found that this poetics is not universal at all, in that it masks a bias toward those with the greatest access to education and the leisure to write—toward the dominant race, gender, and class. Working beyond the limits of established canons to recover knowledge excluded from a false universalism impels a focus on situatedness: a poet’s search for a place from which to speak, whether central or marginal, elevated or immersed, takes place in relation to impinging social forces. Paul Lauter points out that a critical focus on form represents an extreme narrowing of the terms of debate and belongs to a particular historical moment. It manifests the specialization of poetry in relation to print culture, an outcome of struggles over poetic value that arose from the social broadening of literary participation and the sheer unprecedented volume of nineteenth-century print productions. With so many people writing and reading, how could you tell the gems from the dross? Who was really qualified to make and judge poetry? Bourdieu would say of the formalism

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of twentieth-century critical practice that specialists used formalism as a tactic to secure their dominance by establishing the priority of their theories over what people actually do with poetry. Lauter raises considerations other than form—topic, feeling, audience, and impact—that count in valuation, particularly where literary works are integrated into community life, where performance and reception matter at least as much in the transmission of works as their integrity as written texts.10 The recuperation of women authors and authors of color has contributed to a move toward the historicist and cultural study of literary texts, and thus to shifts in how poetics is applied to established as well as newly recovered texts. Brogan discusses this turn away from formalism, suggesting critical questions that, like Lauter’s, direct us to the work poetry does in the social world. The categories of analysis that Western poetic treatises have addressed since Aristotle remain pertinent to critical reading, but they are unsettled, open to “the metacritical task of asking . . . what would constitute an adequate poetics.”11 What relations does the work suggest between literary making and public and private life, work and leisure, state events and everyday life? What standards does it reproduce for distinguishing between cultural highness and lowness, official and popular culture? Does it value newness or familiarity, fixed or unstable meaning, and how does this orientation concern material and philosophical stasis or change? Does emphasis rest on audience or author, speaking or reading, form or substance, pleasure or instruction, representation or expression, advocacy or balance? How does the work situate the subject who knows in relation to the object known? A literary text is engaged in cultural work—in “solving a problem or a set of problems specific to the time in which it was written,”12 in the words of Jane Tompkins. A genre does cultural work by providing society “with a means of thinking about itself, defining certain aspects of a social reality which the authors and their readers shared, dramatizing its conflicts, and recommending solutions.”13 Tompkins writes that the sentimental novel does more than illustrate a possible strategy for change: “it is itself an agent of that strategy, putting into practice the measures it prescribes.”14 We might generally expect the cultural work of poetry to differ from that of the novel. The two genres structure time differently; and, as Bourdieu argues, time is what we must attend to if we are to turn away from a formalist imposition of norms. Time, according to Bourdieu—its rhythms, its

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unfoldings, its irreversibility—defines the strategies people actually use for responding to social structures.15 What does one do first? How long does one wait before taking the next action? How does one pace one’s contribution so that it is unique yet suitable? Although much of the poetry American women published was publicly engaged, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, when we read backward through modernism we may not expect poems to recommend or act out strategies for changing the actual world. While sentimental narrative organizes time by situating people’s choices of actions in a soteriological sequence, lyric poetry disconnects voice from history and thus excludes agency. “All lyrics oppose speech to the action from which it exempts itself,”16 Sharon Cameron writes in her study of Emily Dickinson. Lyric poetry as a field defines its autonomy in resistance to the temporal world of historical action. Lyric poems insist that coherence be made of isolated moments because there is no direct experience of an alternative. They suggest, too, that meaning resides neither in historical connection nor in the connection between one temporal event and another. . . . They insist that meaning depends upon the severing of incident from context, as if only isolation could guarantee coherence.17

Despair underlies the lyric’s search for meaning, much the same despair that underlies the joke in “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy,” the joke that the child’s strategy for making sense of the mummy will never work. “It is a despair of the possibility of complete stories, of stories whose conclusions are known, and consequently it is despair of complete knowledge.”18 The lyric celebrates the subject’s powerlessness to change time—to alter the progression of consequences in the stories of our lives or in the histories of an incoherent social world (the world, in the framework of my study, of racial modernity). “Voice gives way, exhausts itself, at the recognition that it cannot make a difference, that it cannot be, except removed from time.”19 The subject makes a place for itself despite the impossibility of its place in social time; the lyric drive for refuge from time is thus also the method for its cultural work, its protest and critique. At the height of formalism’s dominance in Western literary theory, Theodor Adorno anticipated that, when he spoke of lyric poetry and soci-

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ety, his audience would object that he was violating the lyric’s very reason for being: A sphere of expression whose very essence lies in either not acknowledging the power of socialization or overcoming it through the pathos of detachment . . . is to be arrogantly turned into the opposite of what it conceives itself to be through the way it is examined. Can anyone, you will ask, but a man who is insensitive to the Muse talk about lyric poetry and society?20

Cameron offers a basis for countering objections such as these: society is integral to the lyric. If it is to make sense, the lyric cannot exist without language, a resource of social time. Language tells the difference between this and the other time, the still moment and the world of temporal advance that it resists; but the meaning of the moment must be unfolded in a sequence of words, so that simply speaking the still moment into being reminds us of time. Further, the workings of language are what stirs the passion and struggle of the lyric. Language bears with it the lyric’s antagonists, death and other endings, because it removes us from a reimagined “infancy of time” where words are not needed, where self and other are one.21 Cameron’s placement of society in relationship to poetry has much in common with that of Adorno, whose answer to objections to reading poetry in relation to society is both useful and unsatisfactory for a recuperative poetics. He urges readers to “discover how the entirety of a society, conceived as an internally contradictory unity, is manifested in the work of art, in what way the work of art remains subject to society and in what way it transcends it.”22 He argues that even the intense individuation of the lyric is socially prescribed. In industrial society, according to Adorno, when the lyric does not give in to nostalgia for a romantic past, it seeks “a self-restoring immediacy” through language, a quixotic enterprise “in which what is possible transcends its own impossibility.”23 The impossibility of self-restoration, he continues, “enriches the poem’s substance: language’s chimerical yearning for the impossible becomes an expression of the subject’s insatiable erotic longing, which finds relief from the self in the other.”24 Adorno does not find it problematic that, in the poems he discusses, this “other” whose presence helps to divert the lyric from nostalgia to a saving immediacy is an unspeaking female background to the lyric voice. Celebrating lyric speech that “breaks down the walls of individuality through

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its consummation of the particular,”25 Adorno leaves unexamined an enduring theme of poetics, that women are the material on which male consciousness works out its transcendence.26 This is the theme whose horrific side Edgar Allan Poe encrypted in explaining his choice of topics for “The Raven”: “The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (1845).27 Like other theoretical domains, Western poetics from the classical era on cast women as lesser beings, restricted in their capacity to act and speak. Maleness creates knowledge, transcending physicality by learning the limits of what can be rationally known, while femaleness is the passive medium through which male transformation takes place. Similarly, and increasingly as European exploration, colonization, and commerce expanded, racial others occupied the role of exotic object. In the history of relations between black and white Americans, race signifies a system for producing property, pleasure, and leisure for one race through the property status, bodily victimization, and labor of the other. Racial difference thus takes roles similar to those that gender difference occupies in the dominant tradition of Western poetics. For a critical poetics concerned with systemic oppression, we must examine the uses that the lyric self makes of the other and the interests those uses serve in a hierarchical social structure. To locate the social shaping of the poetic subject, we must go beyond situating ethos, the presence of a shaping mind, in history. We need to seek the deep cultural themes that subjects play out as they make and are made by unequal social structures. Taking apart historical constructions can lead us into a dilemma in dealing with categories of identity such as race. If race is socially constructed in the interests of existing hierarchies, is not the goal of deconstruction to abolish the illusion of race? Walter Benn Michaels articulates one notable version of this dilemma in Our America, where he argues that it is impossible to defend the use of the term “race” without falling into intellectual error. Michaels offers the critical reader two choices: race “is either an essence or an illusion.”28 Race, for Michaels, is simply an intellectual mistake, and debate about the theoretical status of the category race reinforces concepts of identity that make no sense. But Michaels’s argument might have taken other directions. To treat the eradication of all essentialism as the primary objective of deconstructive method is to fall into an error that deconstructive method is capable of exposing.29 Deconstructive theory suggests that having only two choices means something has been left out. We are to look

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for the processes by which only those two mutually exclusive choices have been produced and what interests are served by the reduction of our options to binaristic choices. Speaking of what it is like to experience race in “what actually happens,” Bannerji writes, “It is always like that, this being in society, it lacks neatness, a proper compartmentalization, it needs a lot of clay to make its constructions.”30 Michaels, critiquing the concept of a raced “cultural identity” as masked essentialism, falls short of accounting for how culture forms in relation to power—disrupted by, responding to, appropriating, and resisting the limits imposed by a raced hierarchy of power. “It will not take much insight,” Bannerji points out, “to recognize that people who are most exercised about the issue of identity in terms of political and personal power relations are all people who have been repressed and marginalized,” people “without names of their own choosing.”31 Bannerji counters essentialism by affirming that there is no racial, cultural, or subjective essence to which unnamed people can return in claiming a cultural identity and, like Michaels, by describing problems that arise when people seek to recover an essential identity from before colonization, diaspora, or modernity. But the error that is race calls for less orderly critical activity than Michaels’s argument indicates. The nature of race, or of cultural identity, cannot be reduced to two choices because both the “need for an identity, which negates the imposed one,” and “the character of the emerging forms” of identity, “depend on the specific history of domination and dispossession” from which there is no escape. One chooses and does not choose to have a particular racial identity, and differing identities cannot be reduced to formal theoretical equivalence. “Belonging is long and painful, but it is belonging nonetheless,” Bannerji writes.32 To belong is to live with the consequences of the history of “illusions” about race. As Eric Sundquist points out, “Given the long failure of American legislation, jurisprudence, social theory, and artistic endeavor truly to erase color from our consciousness of opportunity and right, it is hard not to hold that race remains very much at the center of the American experience.”33 The goal of deconstructive methodology is not to abolish problematic categories of analysis but to use them to create resistant knowledge. Exposing intellectual errors is not the endgame of deconstruction but part of the method. The goal is justice. Critical readers are raced subjects. To erase race is a privilege generally accessible to those who, however divergent

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their histories, can claim identities for which race is not a repressive limit. It is a gesture therefore that should raise our suspicions about our present critical practice—like the child’s hopeless interrogation of the Kentucky mummy—and lead us to new questions and further movement. Pictures at the Edge of What Is Possible Writing of white feminists’ expressions of empathy for women of color, Bannerji pointedly calls on white women to acknowledge, without guilt or condescension, that we too are raced subjects experiencing racist social structures: Why do they, I thought, only talk about racism, as understanding us, doing good to “us?” Why don’t they move from the experience of sharing our pain, to narrating the experience of afflicting it on us? Why do they not question their own cultures, childhoods, upbringings, and ask how they could live so “naturally” in this “white” environment, never noticing the fact until we brought it home to them?34

Bannerji’s call for white feminists to create knowledge about whiteness, starting as it does by rejecting a politics of sympathy, resonates to James Baldwin’s devastating critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a work whose influence is everywhere in the poems I examine that were written after its publication. Baldwin’s objection returns us to the theoretical terrain of resistance to time which I discussed in the previous section, and opens up a way of accounting for the making of stereotypes, the cultural work that Gould’s mummy poem explores. Baldwin’s objection is not directly that Stowe’s characters are stereotypical, but rather that the political effect of “everybody’s protest novel” relies on terror. For Baldwin, the explanation that Stowe was unflinchingly telling the truth about a violent system falters when we ask “what constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality—unmotivated, senseless—and to leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds.”35 Baldwin explains Stowe’s failure to address the “only important question” in terms of a binaristic theology for which white is good and black is evil, whose “terror of damnation” is the same “fear of the dark” that generates panic over the blurring of racial boundaries. Driving Stowe’s evasiveness, he writes, is a rejection of “man’s” complexity: “In

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overlooking, denying, evading his complexity—which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves—we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves.”36 Far from documenting the plain truth, for Baldwin Stowe’s representations of terrorized black bodies mark the limits of her capacity for confronting the truth. Stereotypes do their cultural work at the limits of understanding by abolishing the need to inquire further into the system that generated them. Masking and mystifying real social relationships, they give existing systems of oppression the appearance of being self-explanatory, natural, inevitable. At the same time, however, stereotypes are loaded with information about what is at stake in their creation and preservation.37 Jane Tompkins emphasizes the effectiveness of stereotyped characters like those in Uncle Tom’s Cabin in carrying out the genre’s cultural work. They are highly mobile carriers of cultural themes: “Stereotypes are the instantly recognizable representatives of overlapping racial, sexual, national, ethnic, economic, social, political, and religious categories; they convey enormous amounts of cultural information in an extremely condensed form.”38 Baldwin, however, is less concerned with the success of Stowe’s characterizations in capturing cultural information than he is with questions about how modern systems of power work and why people consent to them. Bourdieu addresses these questions by describing habitus, the mental habits that individuals internalize through their socialization into identity categories. Habitus adapts the actor to the limits of a category. Even strategies for improvising or resisting limits transfer deep cultural patterns from one kind of problem to another as actors confront the constraints, opportunities, and changing shapes of external social structures. What people do is thus not simply shaped by unequal social structures; people reproduce inequality in every kind of cultural symbol, practice, and institution.39 Baldwin describes the process by which oppressed actors consent to and reproduce their prescribed station in terms much like habitus: “It is the peculiar triumph of society—and its loss—that it is able to convince those people to whom it has given inferior status of the reality of this decree; it has the force and the weapons to translate its dictum into fact, so that the allegedly inferior are actually made so, insofar as the societal realities are concerned.”40

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The folklore of identity—including stereotype, although Baldwin does not name it—springs up to separate an organized society from the undifferentiated, unrepresentable space where hunger, danger, and darkness drive its hierarchical construction: Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden. From this void—ourselves—it is the function of society to protect us; but it is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation, which can save us.41

Tompkins argues that, for nineteenth-century readers, stereotypes bear evidence of the continuity of the sacred; they are “essential properties of a narrative aimed at demonstrating that human history is a continual reenactment of the sacred drama of redemption” in which sacrificial death is the highest human calling.42 For Baldwin, however, the drama that requires the deaths of Little Eva and Uncle Tom, with its basis in a Manichean horror of darkness, must not be taken on its own terms. Reading Baldwin’s critique through Bourdieu compels us not only to consider the effectiveness of typological elements in executing cultural work through the narratives they sustain but also to critique them as homologies, signs of the cultural myths that habitus carries from religion to economics to race and beyond, myths that motivate the reconstruction of social hierarchies. As a homological form, death marks a time of crisis so extreme that it shatters one’s sense of what it is to live. The other side of the divide it marks cannot be situated in bodies or social life. The “old center of existence” has been displaced, as Cameron puts it, and with its loss “comes the discovery of the meaning of limitation, comes the discovery of death.” Sacrificial death populates the space on the other side of time, beyond the crisis of limitation that splits time, with figures that hold out the hope that meaning can be salvaged. This population of figures signifies the losses that will be restored; but, as Gould seems to acknowledge in her mummy poem, signs of redemption have never been present in the past and the future they promise will never be. “For,” Cameron writes, “to tell time is to tell difference, to note the failure of resemblance ever to be the same as that from which it differs.”43 Traces of the other time are different from the

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time they represent. On exhibit in a New England museum, the Kentucky mummy has no kinfolk and her music is silent. Like the figures of the lyric, stereotypes are substitutions that work against time, representations that replace individual and collective histories. Lyric utterances strive to convert a state of otherness “that precedes them, precipitates them, and that they are not.” Stereotypes refer to the conditions that produced them but convert them into exemptions from historical causality. Like the lyric, stereotypes travel the same repetitive ground, struggling for separateness from history. The lyric transforms sequence into simultaneity and spatializes the temporal movement of relationships between selves and others. The lyric distributes traces of time through space and converts action into voice, and generalized meanings take over for individual ones. Conflict is parodied, differences exaggerated and collapsed.44 Stereotypes work in similar ways, invested with anxiety about time. Baldwin calls our attention to how representations of terror inflicted on bodies that have been reduced to stereotypes signify the void that both threatens and generates social order. Slavoj Zizek describes the effects of confronting the fascinating but deadly borderline surrounding the void as “the trauma of the inherent impossibility.”45 Habitus converts what an actor learns he cannot do without facing disempowerment and pain into a prohibited activity: we who share this identity, this social rank, do not do this (not we cannot do this). For Zizek the fantasy that arises from terror works in a similar way: it turns the impossible into something that is possible but prohibited. When we look into terror, its unbearable reality may turn into a blissful fantasy of a restored past “where life is governed by a benevolent Fate,” where harmonious sexual relationships fulfill generations of dreams—where lyric longing finds fulfillment.46 A symbolic representation of the possibility of bliss closes off to view that which is beyond the limits of organized experience and “ ‘reality’ stabilizes itself.”47 The fantasy of bliss thus works to repair ruptures in the justification of the social order that a traumatic confrontation with terror has brought about—a resolution that Gould denies her child speaker, who stands gazing at a sign of horror that resists its viewer’s efforts to reimagine the past. For members of the dominant race who are evading questions about the role of their race in creating the terror of slavery, the stereotype of Mammy represents a fantasy of bliss. As a substitute mother figure, Mammy gives

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body to the primordial other who has never quite been there—the reimagined caregiver “who can satisfy our need, who can give us the object of satisfaction, deprive us of it, or hinder our access to it.”48 Mammy’s compliance with the system of slavery testifies not to the injury she might suffer from its constraints but to her selfless love for the “alien children” she places above those of her own race.49 Gould’s ironic primordial other is shriveled and ungiving, but Mammy, oversized and large-breasted, is an image of fertility. Her goodness, however, depends on her reproductivity being vestigial, having been wholly appropriated for the care of white children. With her own race, Mammy is a bad matriarch. Her strength could pose a threat to white male authority, as Mammy figures do in slave narratives, but the white-constructed stereotype converts her subversive potential into an instrument for keeping the racial system in place. Unfeminine and verbally aggressive toward other slaves, particularly in her sharptongued Sapphire manifestation, she transmits the degeneracy of the race. The sexually aggressive Jezebel stereotype that I first saw in Gould’s mummy bears the cultural work of justifying the sexual exploitation of black women. But Mammy’s desexualized reproductivity denies this history: no white man would want her, and she emasculates black men. The image of Mammy then captures the unrepresentability of black women’s childbearing, unrepresentable because black women’s reproductivity, riddled with double binds, pervades the void where the impossible question “Why did your people do this to us?” waits to be answered—a question, I believe, from which the white lyric voice retreats in shaping poetry’s separateness from the social dynamics of racial modernity. The lyric impulse to freeze time, to escape it, drives racial stereotypes; they mark a rejection of the temporality of raced institutions. The blessing of Mammy’s Arcadian accessibility to white children substitutes for the terror of black women’s actual historical roles in reproducing slavery, particularly once the slave trade ended—their reproductivity regulated to make them the objects of sexual violence and economic desire. “As objects,” bell hooks writes, “one’s reality is defined by others, one’s identity created by others, one’s history named only in ways that define one’s relationship to those who are subject.”50 Mammy then is a consequence of slavery’s unnaming black women. Mammy’s asexual body and disciplinary voice turn forced miscegenation and slaves’ actual strategies for resisting the system into a white fantasy of nurture freely given out of love. At the intersection of race and

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time, Mammy organizes blackness into the past and whiteness into the future: she is a reference to the past as the primal source of a race whose future she herself obstructs, while her care of white children signifies the future through her loving consent to the ascendancy of the dominant race.51 Contested Temporal Boundaries The poetics of time concerns not only how a poem reflects its contemporaneity but how it looks back, how it remembers, what it forgets, its marking a temporal divide and reconstructing a time before. The work of memory is political. Memorial narratives form collective identities; they transform past events with the inscription of later struggles; they consolidate traces of the past within the self into a historical consciousness marked with degrees of determinism and freedom. A disciplinary regime’s imposition of causal continuity through the creation of memories of threat or pain materializes identity. A dominant ideology validates certain memories as representative and dismisses others as aberrations; a work of memory may promote claims for seeking cultural centrality, or it may operate at the margins to preserve materials vulnerable to loss.52 A central premise of my poetics of race and time is that the change from a nation with slavery to one without works as a historical trauma characteristic of modernity, a crisis that splits the present from the past, and that the political work of memory organizes deep cultural themes concerned with race around this split in time. In Americanist disciplines, the historical shift of slavery’s end has generally been overshadowed by the Civil War. The terms “antebellum” and “postbellum” serve as exceptionalist pillars, supports of the national distinctiveness of American cultural objects. The terms reference race because the Civil War brought about the end of the institution of slavery, but their usage has not historically implied that these disciplines considered race significant. “Antebellum” and “postbellum” mask race because they mark the war itself as the nation’s pivotal historical trauma, not the long-term presence of racial oppression and violence. Just as the Civil War—still the most obsessively consumed period of American history—has been explained, described, and reenacted in ways that place the end of slavery low on a list of significant events, so “ante” and “post” have referred to a host of crises in the dominant racial experience in ways that render invisible the historical workings of race as a system of difference.

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Although I use “antebellum” and “postbellum” here, I focus on the transition from a nation with slavery to one without, with the aim of complicating that divide as well. Racial modernity, the attitudes and practices that sustained racial inequality apart from and after slavery, arose long before emancipation, supporting the adaptation of the premodern institution of slavery to undergird the enriching of Europe and the development of the Americas. The characteristic attitudes of racial modernity were well established by 1840 and influenced antislavery as well as proslavery discourse.53 The nervousness about race that Gould invested in her mummy called my attention to the weakness of abolitionism as an antiracist discourse. One of the few works by a white author that does address racial difference and race hatred, Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833, 1836), offers examples of the contingency of antiracist discourse on the conditions that surround it. Child’s methods are at least partially deconstructive; she insists that slavery constructs not only the supposed essential characteristics of African Americans but also white racial hostility: “We made slavery, and slavery makes the prejudice.”54 She does not spare the North: “Our prejudice against colored people is even more inveterate than it is at the South,” she writes, introducing a catalog of northern instances of racist discrimination.55 But Child’s argumentational strategies tend at least partly to reinforce the claims that she opposes. Condemning white resistance to the establishment of schools for blacks, Child owns that “with our firm belief in the natural inferiority of negroes, it is strange we should be so much afraid that knowledge will elevate them quite too high for our convenience.”56 And, amassing evidence of positive attributes of blacks outside American slavery, Child relies on myth, ancient history, and colonial travelers’ accounts—all problematic sources, as Child sometimes acknowledges. Her effort tends to rely on distinguishing among degrees of humaneness in white-authored records and narratives, and pitting exotic and condescending “positive” representations of the African other against degrading negative stereotypes. Abolitionism fell short of establishing an antiracist discourse that transcended racial modernity. But to frame the larger issue surrounding the mummy’s racially ambiguous face in this way is to skew time, to hold a movement of one historical era responsible for failing to use the light of later eras to mend its strategies. My first sense of the issues wrapped up in Gould’s mummy showed me that I had aligned my own critical position

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with that of white abolitionism, a position from which I could deflect Bannerji’s and Baldwin’s difficult questions. My disappointment with Gould concerned a wish that abolitionism had located a time-free critical view, and perhaps a wider disappointment that slavery did not end in a passage out of time that also ended the history of racial conflict, as it did in the radical abolitionist imagination. From the perspective of white opposition to slavery, the divide between “antebellum” and “postbellum,” when it is looked back on rather than forward to, represents the loss of a way of practicing active citizenship. With emancipation, the material frame for antebellum race discourse fell away; the need to think, speak, meet, and act against slavery ended. Toni Morrison captures this loss of practice in Beloved in the character of Edward Bodwin, an elderly Quaker nostalgic for the abolitionist era.57 The divide of slavery’s end also marks the existence of a surplus of race beyond its antebellum institutional construction. The material scaffolding that in Child’s words “makes the prejudice” also ended, yet the prejudice endured, as it would endure later changes in the official structure of race, an excess beyond emancipation, Supreme Court decisions, and civil rights legislation in its violent adaptability to changing political and economic forms. The loss for advocates of particular antiracist strategies doubles: not only is the specific practice a thing of the past, but the truth value of the theory that sustained its spirit tarnishes in the air of mixed success. And, for white advocates of justice for the other, there is a third loss, one whose wishes veer toward convergence with myths of the other that underwrite racial oppression: loss of the fantasy of what the other will be to “me” once we become subjects together. For American literature, however—from the revisionary racialism of the plantation tradition to William Faulkner’s investment in Dilcey to the Southern Agrarian poet-critics’ privileging of formalism—neither an antislavery nor exactly a proslavery position has dominated the slant in how the past has been conserved, but rather a resistance to history that settled its fear and longing on objects tied to the slave past. The antecedents to a historical crisis that separates modernity from the past—and even the crisis itself—are necessarily reconstructed after the fact, sorted out along binaristic lines. The past becomes a nostalgic space like the “dream of bliss” Zizek describes, a space of wholeness where identity boundaries are fluid, whose

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raw resources are to be brought into the formation of modern identities, meanings, and values. From the viewpoint of a modern cultivated consciousness, nature is a distant space of sensual and moral nostalgia, but it is also naive, unfree, and subject to denigration. Friedrich Schiller captures the negative valence of the natural other with his scorn for nostalgic longing in Romantic poetry: “That nature you envy in things devoid of reason is not worthy of your respect and longing.”58 Nature is redemptive only when it is abducted, domesticated, consumed: “take nature up into yourself and strive to wed its unlimited advantages to your own endless prerogatives, and from the marriage of both strive to give birth to something divine.”59 Emerson’s tone differs from Schiller’s—he criticizes disdain toward nature, but he too rationalizes man’s domination over nature, which, for Emerson, includes everything that is other, “all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME.” Emerson associates hostility toward nature with the skepticism that “all culture” perpetrates about the very existence of the material world. He finds this hostility ungrateful, claiming to have a “child’s love” for his “beautiful mother.” His intention “to indicate the true position of nature in regard to man,” however, runs into difficulties when he is faced with the presence of actual people at work on the land: “You cannot freely admire a noble landscape if laborers are digging in the field hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his delight until he is out of the sight of men.”60 For Emerson as for Schiller, nature properly serves as a resource not for physical labor but for the human will, whose relationship to nature he depicts sexually: “All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life.”61 And, theorizing nature as a resource for poetic transcendence, Emerson like Schiller replaces a potentially horrifying awareness of nature, of matter, of unfreedom, with a fantasy of eroticized dominance over, even annihilation of the other: Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mold into what is useful. Man is never weary of working it up. He forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and melodious words, and gives them wing as angels of persuasion

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and command. One after another his victorious thought comes up with and reduces all things, until the world becomes at last only a realized will,—the double of the man.62

We are immersed here in the dream landscape of the all-giving maternal other, the object whose only story once she is unnamed is her willing service—the homological tissues of which Mammy is made. As Patricia Hill Collins points out, Mammy is a sign of nature objectified to justify its exploitation as well as the subordination of those others—women, colonized people—identified as less than human, close to nature. Grandly bearing the physicality erased from the white feminine ideal, she is a disposal site for the fears that Western modernity projects into female reproductivity: the womb as tomb, site of terror, void beyond the border. As a mother who cannot be a mother, Mammy’s reproductive functions are then blanked out through the appropriation of her emotional labor. Domestication renders nature, Mammy, woman, the womb harmless.63 Elsewhere in Emerson’s writing, nature, like Mammy, takes the side of those in power. Writing “Emancipation in the West Indies” in 1844, Emerson shows his engagement with the intellectual framework of racial modernity, arguing that the historical relations between oppressor and oppressed are of interest only insofar as they show us the workings of nature, which “will only save what is worth saving; and it saves not by compassion, but by power.” Men are subject to the same processes of selection as other species: “If they are rude and foolish, down they must go.” Emerson’s rhetoric both naturalizes slavery and discovers a reason for its end: If the black man is feeble and not important to the existing races, not on a parity with the best race, the black man must serve, and be exterminated. But if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization; for the sake of that element, no wrong nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him: he will survive and play his part.64

He belittles white antislavery as “poor squeamishness and nervousness” in contrast to the “anti-slave,” the leaders of slave rebellions in the West Indies, who provide the needed evidence that the black race could contribute to the future. His rhetorical disdain for antislavery calls attention to ways that the historical divide of emancipation must be complicated: a single historical event did not constitute the dismantling of slavery, nor was the

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end of slavery engineered solely by the dominant race. What is stunningly missing in Emerson’s extraction of an antislavery claim from the rhetoric of racial modernity, however, is any acknowledgment that enslaved Africans did make indispensable contributions. In sheer numbers, African slaves dominated the movement of people to the Americas during the three centuries “when the foundations of the new societies were being laid,” Sheila S. Walker writes.65 Like the poet of nature inconvenienced by the presence of agricultural workers, Emerson fails to acknowledge that physical labor constitutes a human contribution; but, as Walker argues, far more is erased in marginalizing the African presence in the early modern Americas. The “largest human migration” in history “constituted the world’s first massive brain drain and transfer of technology,” bringing to the Americas capabilities that contributed to every aspect of the shaping of colonial societies. Scholarship on the African diaspora finds the influence of the colonies’ early displaced majority everywhere— “in the nature of economic systems, in struggles for and concepts of freedom and justice, in technology and material culture, in the arts and the art of celebration, in popular culture, in spirituality and religion, in everyday language and gastronomy.”66 If African practices pervaded new cultural formations in the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade had a still wider impact; Howard Dodson argues that it governed the shaping of modernity “by fostering the development of the levels of communication, trade, cultural exchange, and economic and political interdependence among the nations of Europe, Africa, and the Americas that characterize the modern era.” Europeans “reorganized their political, economic, social, and cultural institutions to carry out the vast trade in human lives that was the most important international commercial activity of the era.”67 Every field of endeavor that characterizes Euro-American modernity, in other words, has historical roots in Africa and slavery. Slavery laid the material ground for the development of the ideologies and practices associated with modern capitalism and democratic institutions—despite the apparent contradictions between the existence of slavery and the precepts of liberal political economy. Emerson envisions the temporal divide of slavery’s end not as the work of white abolitionists’ “nervous” politics of sentimentality but as black men’s entry into history as full humans. In so doing, however, he rejects the temporality of slavery as an institution. “Who cares for oppressing whites,

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or oppressed blacks, twenty centuries ago, more than for bad dreams? Eaters and food are in the harmony of Nature.” The naturalized rhythms of race belong to an indistinct past; in the future, when all have proved themselves men, there will be no race. The West Indian rebellions promise a postslavery future that is race blind: “Here is man: and if you have man, black or white is an insignificance.”68 Race will be erased; and, if black heroes are simply “man” without race, their heroic will redounds to the credit of “men” generally, including Emerson—a gendered fantasy of what the other will mean to him once race is no more. The significance of this apotheosis, however, again, depends on the insignificance of all that preceded it, on Africa and slavery being forgettable. The historical divide of emancipation must be further complicated with a recognition of the hugeness of this detemporalized convergence of race and time and the impossibility of pinning down a singular event through which its traumas marked identity with the difference between before and after. The other gender haunts these discounted centuries. Sundquist highlights W. E. B. Du Bois’s figuring the devastated “body” of colonized Africa as a woman in “The Riddle of the Sphinx”: The will of the world is a whistling wind, sweeping a cloud-swept sky, And not from the East and not from the West knelled that soul-waking cry, But out of the South,—the sad, black South—it screamed from the top of the sky, Crying: “Awake, O ancient race!” Wailing, “O woman arise!” And crying and sighing and crying again as a voice in the midnight cries,— But the burden of white men bore her back and the white world stifled her sighs.69

The transcendent force of will calls out to woman but oppression—not nature—holds her out of history. If the work of recovery is political and interested, because the past is always different from the memorial objects that represent it, so is the temporal divide itself. What was it that shook us all so? There is never just one crisis of identity formation, one moment that shocks us into a reorganized image of self, and the singular construction of a historical divide organizes experience at the expense of knowledge, especially knowledge of the workings of difference.

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Reading through Race and Time Reading the poems of nineteenth-century American women through “race” and “time,” then, helps us not only to appreciate their place in cultural history but also to recognize how the processes of racial modernity set the terms for change in the genre—change in what counts as poetry and who counts as its writers and readers, and what and who do not. In chapter 2, “Contesting the Pearl: Whiteness, Blackness, and the Possession of American Poetry,” I call attention to several characteristics of nineteenthcentury American culture that urge our focus specifically on women’s poetry in considering race as a topos. First, poetry was a vital component of American popular print culture during its coming of age—quite possibly, as Edmund Clarence Stedman claimed in 1900, the leading American literary genre from the 1820s to the 1870s.70 Second, female literacy rose dramatically during the first half of the century, and, corresponding exactly to the period of poetry’s dominance—the twenties through the seventies— American women readers, writers, and editors developed and sustained an alternative, female public print culture. Third, at the same time that print culture opened to white women, legal, civic, and private sanctions barred all but a few African Americans from literacy. Finally, the one antebellum arena that significantly challenged the assumption that both reader and writer are white was the radical abolitionist movement—an arena that also produced much poetry and broke ground for women’s public culture. I argue that the significance of race in the development of American culture, as well as the significance of women writers and readers, may well help to account for twentieth-century canonizers’ low regard for nineteenth-century American poets other than Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Given Dickinson’s exceptional place as the whole of the canonized field of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, I close the chapter with readings that explore the social in her lyrics, concentrating on how her use of race in the construction of the literary typifies dominant trends in American literary history. Looking back on nineteenth-century American poetry from the year 1900, Stedman describes two major phases in its development: “poetry of conviction” dominated the antebellum period, while poetry for its own sake, “poetry of beauty and feeling,” dominated the later decades of the century.71 Building on Karen Sanchez-Eppler’s unfolding of the wide-

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spread resonances of women’s abolitionism in the American lyric,72 I propose that “poetry of conviction” not be treated as a category altogether distinct from “poetry of beauty and feeling” but as a workshop for poetics during a formative, contestatory phase in the shaping of American cultural hierarchies. Chapters 3 and 4 form a section on antebellum women’s poetry, featuring an abolitionist poem and the mummy poem by Hannah Flagg Gould, one of the most popular women poets of the era. Chapter 3, “Skins May Differ: Women’s Republicanism and the Poetics of Abolitionism,” identifies divergences between abolitionist poetics and the elite poetic tradition by reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “A Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” in the context of American women’s abolitionist poetry, then derives common features of women abolitionists’ poetics and their range of variation in order to highlight what is distinctive about Gould’s approach. Chapter 4, “The Mummy’s Return: Kinship, Humor, and the Bindings of Print,” explores the stresses between radical antislavery and genteel republicanism in women’s culture by comparing Gould’s “The Slave Mother’s Prayer” with “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy”—stresses that, I argue, mark out the fissures to which women’s poetics will adapt in reconforming to changes in the structure of racial modernity. Chapters 5 through 8 concern postbellum women’s poetry, exploring race in the poetics that women writers developed as female print culture lost its antebellum definition and public influence. The section concentrates on three poems: “A Child’s Party (in Kentucky, AD 185_)” by Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, “Deliverance” by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Loew’s Bridge: A Broadway Idyl by Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert. In chapter 5, “Looking in the Glass: Sarah Piatt’s Poetics of Play and Loss”; chapter 6, “We Women Radicals: Frances Harper’s Poetics of Racial Formation”; and chapter 7, “What One Is not Was: Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert’s Poetics of Self-Reconstruction,” I offer readings that examine how each poet looks back at the poetics of antebellum women’s print culture, extends the schisms formed around antislavery discourse, and responds to racial modernity in ways that alter poetry’s relationship to public social forces. The poems I discuss in these chapters represent three different strategies for temporally positioning the female subject in relationship to racial modernity, strategies that produce differing sequels to abolitionism and emancipation. In “A Child’s Party,” Piatt presents a subjectivity split along

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the temporal divide marked by the end of slavery, a white adult subject all but alienated from her child self. The poem turns back critically on the construction of white femininity and retrieves an icon of black womanhood as a repository of the affective self-division through which the dynamics of racial difference continue to act. The social present is reduced to a white woman–child dyad, while the slave community represents the only social vitality of the past. Sequestering both present and past from the larger, male-dominated world, Piatt holds onto but also ironizes the themes of antebellum women’s public culture. A woman’s poems may go on the market, but Piatt puts up guards against popularity, insisting on the selectiveness of her audience. Impelled into a past where pleasure and identity were imbricated in a racial hierarchy, poetry is detached from the present social scene. To engage in women’s poetics thus involves giving form to internal complexities that originated with the currents that social power stirred in the private spaces of the past. In “The Deliverance,” Harper narrates the progressive emergence of raced identities out of enslaved consciousness and gendered strategies for dealing with conflicts between economic and political subjecthood. The speaker’s subjectivity takes shape in stages, separating from the internalized oppression of slavery in preparation for further development within the gendered constraints of free citizenship. Racial difference develops progressively; far from setting race in the past, emancipation begins the future of race as a category of potentially undivided solidarity. The republicanism of antebellum women’s public culture begins anew, transferred from the white-dominated mainstream to the marginalized race for whom republican fundamentals have just been belatedly legislated. The task of individuals and communities is to grasp how external social forces work and to establish the basis for generating resistance and advancement from within. Poetry both prescribes and memorializes the stages of identity formation in relationship to the broader social forces that define racial modernity. To engage in women’s poetics is to be a woman radical, working provisionally within legislated gender difference to chronicle the workings of social power on and in the community, drawing lines between false and true selfinterest, and envisioning how social justice will be realized. In Loew’s Bridge, Lambert shapes subjectivity in response to the fissured experience of New York City, the new hub of increasingly masculinist cultural production. Racial difference exists only in the antebellum South,

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where black figures are static, diminutive complements to the moral dramas of whiteness. No longer focused on struggles over slavery and sectionalism, social power has become diffuse, spread among individual achievers and occupational cadres. Women’s culture too diffuses in this social reality, its domestic themes now rendered peripheral. A woman writing poetry may hold onto traces of feminine virtue, but there is no evading the publicness of print, the fall out of domesticity into the street. Poetry recovers traces of affect and race from the past, but turns its critical attention toward participation in the all-white mainstream marketplace. To engage in women’s poetics is to translate remnants of domestic culture into the masculinist market, subject to its career paths even if critical of its abuses of social power. Chapter 8, “Critical Positions in Racial Modernity: An Approach to Teaching,” offers a way of putting these three poems into dialogue in the classroom, making use of my own discovery of what they have to offer to pedagogy and theoretical discourse about modernity. Frederic Jameson provides a model for linkage between historical subjectivities and pedagogical practice when he speaks of mapping subjects into historical materiality by way of the imaginary in order to restore critical differences between the present and the past. Rather than projecting an inevitability or suitability to the relationship between present and past, learners are to look to historical materials for “radical moments”—instances of self-awareness that enable individual and collective action—and experiment with them as surrogate viewpoints.73 The shift to critical and pedagogical considerations suggests ways of using the three postbellum poems to explore interactions among aesthetic (represented by Piatt’s poem), activist (Harper), and critical (Lambert) modes of reading. In these examples, the aesthetic exposes dynamics of subject formation that the critical reifies; the activist chronicles a struggle that exposes the other modes’ complicity in racial hierarchies; and the critical models the possibility of extending authority formed locally, as the activist’s is, to the larger field of modernity. Each mode has its own kind of “radical moment”; and, while the activist provides the broadest map for pedagogy, teaching and learning communities must fill out the features of the landscape for their own time and place, making use of imaginative play and analytical thought to reach beyond the limits of what is. Chapter 9, “The Containment of Childhood: Reproducing Consumption in American Children’s Verse,” takes up a strong secondary thread of

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the readings in this study to sketch out American children’s verse as an area of study that is richly imbricated with the poetics of time and, though less visibly, race. The two poems most concerned with childhood, Gould’s “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” and Piatt’s “A Child’s Party (in Kentucky, AD 185_),” both dramatize instances of a formative relationship between white childhood and other-raced, female oral materials. A project emanating from British and European Romantic efforts to collect and preserve folk verse, the American compilation of Mother Goose nursery rhymes was by 1850 a hodgepodge collection of folk and modern compositions. Eliza Lee Follen and Sarah Josepha Hale, together with the verses they contributed to Mother Goose, illustrate the conflicts over didacticism and nonsense that surrounded this first phase of the flourishing of American children’s verse. These conflicts, enmeshed with ideas about nation, modernity, and race, concerned the direction in which the Romantic concept of childhood was to grow. Formed in part out of folk materials, childhood was to be an imaginative, natural space, but the boundaries needed to protect or enforce its innocence reveal competing social stakes in its formation. The boundaries that children’s poetry drew—a postbellum example is the verse of Mary Mapes Dodge—indicate a drive to prevent white childhood from merging into the very spaces of otherness that nurtured the ideology of childhood. By the turn of the century, the ever-lengthening distance between childhood and adulthood had its own discourse, exemplified by G. Stanley Hall’s massive Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (1904). Transforming Romantic primitivism with the cast of science, Hall made childhood—particularly white, male, American childhood—the province of masculinist expertise. Hall sought to wrest boys away from the female mediator of premodern culture and her genteel heirs, and, for him, Africanism provided models of male virility that could help white boys escape feminization. In closing chapter 9—and proposing a further extension of this study’s concerns—I read through Hall backwards in time to “How Persimmons Took Cah ob der Baby” by Lizzie W. Champney, a poem Dodge published in her children’s magazine, St. Nicholas, in 1874. My reading suggests that postbellum racial stereotypes could be used to justify ambivalences of tone and thus to mask ideological contradictions in the ongoing construction of childhood in relation to gender and race.

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In different but converging ways, Romanticism and republicanism envisioned childhood as a way of redeeming modernity, of gaining control over the processes of historical change. Children had the potential to make the future better than the past—if their mothers trained them properly, did not tamper with their nascent spirituality, and protected them from superstition and corruption. Play, under controlled conditions, could free children and thus the future from a deterministic relation to the past—but it could also mean freedom from awareness of social forces. Childhood time, like lyric time, was to be disengaged from history. With racial modernity setting the terms for American childhood, innocence could mean ignorance, freedom would take place within tightly contained spaces, and free play could be applied to the unknowing reconstruction of systemic injustice. The postbellum reimagining of plantation life suited what was problematic in the construct of childhood. Plantation stereotypes would nurture the vexed “natural” attributes of childhood, offering privileged children a multitude of strategies for producing “freedom” within captivity through play (as the slaves do in Piatt’s poem). But the appropriation of figures from slavery for post-emancipation white childhood also made a future-directed construct—modern childhood—a nostalgic preserve for the racial past, nurturing the imaginative capacity for justifying the persistence of racial inequality, even as the systemic structure of race changed. Abolishing the historicity of slavery, stereotypes as nonsense redirect white anxieties about being participants in the system of race, about not knowing how the system works, why it keeps on working, and what it means to who “we” are. This is the ignorance that masks as “our” innocence. Gould seems to have seen this twist in the formation of stereotypes: the anxiety in her mummy poem seems linked to a recognition that the stereotype-in-themaking had a life about which white observers fail to learn; that the very possibility of nonsense depends upon an impassable gulf between the white reader of cultural objects and a cultural or racial other whom the white subject situates in the past; that the playful innocence ascribed to childhood depends upon an adult despair of knowing.

2 Contesting the Pearl Whiteness, Blackness, and the Possession of American Poetry “A h ye s , I wrote ‘The Purple Cow,’” Frank Gellett Burgess confessed in 1901. “I’m sorry, now, I wrote it, / But I can tell you anyhow / I’ll kill you if you quote it.” Here is the earlier quatrain whose authorship he admitted: I’ve never seen a purple cow, I never hope to see one, But I can tell you anyhow, I’d rather see than be one.

After “The Purple Cow” was published in 1895, it quickly became as familiar as an old chestnut, although few who knew it would have connected it with an author or an avant-garde little magazine. Perhaps, however, some who taught it to their children did recognize in it the tissues of racial stereotype. Burgess’s poem “ELIZABETH: A Gloomy Story, / Perhaps it is an Allegory,” in which anxieties about race, gender, and language are obvious, would not enjoy the oral transmission that sent his cow poem wandering absurdly through generations. Elizabeth’s addiction to drinking ink turns her into a “regular Nigger.” At the close of the nineteenth century, Burgess efficiently dismissed both women and African Americans as users and consumers of a resource of the literary, thus anticipating the exclusion of women writers and writers of color during the early twentieth-century formation of the American literary canon. Toni Morrison asserts that “literary blackness,” the positioning of the black racial other in relationship to the literary, can help us discover the nature and effects of “literary whiteness,” the assumption that reader and writer are both white, and the role of this assumption in defining what is American.1 To apply Morrison’s claim to nineteenth-century women’s po-

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etry not only helps clarify the cultural roles women’s poetry played in the nineteenth-century United States but also allows us to reframe nineteenthcentury American poetry generally as a vital field for cultural-historical studies. A concentration on women’s writing, poetry as well as prose, highlights the political vitality of the American popular print culture during its early growth, inevitably calling attention to the poetics of abolitionism— one of few nineteenth-century discursive arenas where biracial authorship and readership posed significant challenges to literary whiteness. Further, women’s literacy grew with and fed the growth of American print culture at a time when legal, civic, and private sanctions against black literacy held African American participation in print culture to an exceptional few. Gender inclusion and racial exclusion thus act as material keystones of American print culture during its coming of age. A focus on race in readings of poetry also highlights the role of the American racial structure in complicating the American inheritance of the British and European elite literary tradition. Poetry, more than prose genres, extends to the very boundaries of literacy: formalist poetics treats elite poetry as the pinnacle of education and leisure, while unwritten folk traditions are the fount of both elite and popular traditions, and poetry retains a strong link to the oral in literate cultures. And, despite the restrictiveness of elite poetics, as Audre Lorde points out, poetry is an inexpensive art that can be pursued in odd moments seized from a demanding life.2 American poetry grew up under the conditions of modernity that produce popular culture: democratization, urbanization, industrialization, the growth of commerce, educational advances, and the rising hegemony of the middle class. These trends became prominent in the United States around 1830 and took their most dramatic turns after the Civil War—or, rather, after the end of slavery. In Britain and Europe, the same conditions that shaped the emergence of popular culture also transformed elite art, bringing forward the themes and modes of Romanticism. Modernity released high art from dependency on aristocratic patronage, but the traditions of the aristocracy remained central to elite Romantic art, translated into models of exemplary subjectivity. Morrison argues that the racial structure rather than the residual class hierarchy worked at the center of the American literary imagination: “Americans did not have a profligate, predatory nobility from which to wrest an identity of national virtue while continuing to covet aristocratic license and luxury. The American nation

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negotiated both its disdain and its envy . . . through a self-reflexive contemplation of fabricated, mythological Africanism.”3 The fissures of modern historical trauma show in the ways that the resources of modernity, including literacy and leisure, are distributed according to categories of identity. The stakes in depriving the other of these resources are to preserve among “us,” in the present, repositories of ambivalent longing and disdain, through whom modern subjects can aspire to work out a synthesis that transcends alienated freedom. Poetry as a broadly conceived genre—encompassing elite, popular, and oral poetry—offers opportunities to test how a society allocates the resources of modernity along lines of race, gender, class, and other identity categories. While folk art is generally associated with rural life and circulates with little reliance on technological reproduction or distribution, popular art arises in urban environments as print media and exhibition and performance sites take up the task of constructing communities and shaping local knowledge for mobile populations. Popular culture exists within commerce: its consumers must have money, and, for an audience to exist for popular literary forms, literacy must extend well beyond the upper classes. While the folk artist usually is anonymous, the artist’s name may be significant to the commercial value of a popular work. Elite art, as it came to be defined in opposition to the rise of popular art, holds itself above the commercial market. Skill matters in popular art, but the rules for producing it shift with the demands of its consumers, while high art seeks innovations that recognize and transcend standards drawn from the history of a medium. While high art strives for immortality through the expression of a unique consciousness, popular art succeeds by capturing current widespread sentiment. The aims of high art are allied to an aristocratic leisure for self-cultivation that popular art, ever on the market, cannot afford.4 American poetry developed with the support of a growing commercial marketplace which also transformed the ways that citizenship was conceived. Early in the nineteenth century, artisan-publishers regarded print as an instrument of God, a revolutionary weapon for creating a democratic nation and abolishing the remnants of feudal mentality. By 1850, publishing was a viable business. A rapidly growing population, high literacy, increased leisure, the extension of railways, and technological developments that made printing cheaper all contributed to a tenfold growth in American publishing from 1820 to 1850. Classical republicanism idealized public

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life as a sphere of oratorical debate, and citizenship as participation in the communal formation of a moral consensus. Consisting of the professions of law, politics, and the clergy, this public oral culture operated almost exclusively as a white male sphere, while women’s oral transmission of culture took place within families and local communities. For American republicanism, print was an expedient supplement to oratory in the development of consensus, given the national community’s dispersal over distances. Print culture, however, tends to mask its public dimension because a piece of writing generally is produced and consumed in private space; the transaction between writer and reader takes place in the individual imagination and cultivates inward lives. The establishment of American print culture thus helped to transform the dominant ideals of citizenship from communal to individual moral authority and, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, from exemplary individuals to experts whose authority was morally neutral.5 After slavery ended, a large urban labor supply supported a burgeoning corporate capitalism; new technology and the growth of business opened white- and blue-collar occupations. Working citydwellers, whose on-thejob hours decreased to yield more leisure time over the latter third of the century, became consumers as well as workers. By the end of the century, a mass culture that promoted national interests alongside the values of achievement and consumerism had overshadowed local interests and agrarian and petit-bourgeois values. Literary production both took part in and resisted the postbellum ascendancy of free-labor entrepreneurial capitalism over the agrarian feudal economy that dominated sectional political conflicts for most of the first half of the century. By the 1860s the cultural marketplace had fractured into multiple layers formed around class, gender, region, race, and ethnicity, while high-literary culture increasingly disengaged its criteria of value from what would sell.6 Publishing lagged behind other industries as publishers resisted overtly commercial practices, but publishers whose primary aim was high sales, who cared little about promoting moral values, began to appear by the 1880s—representatives of the ascendency of the specialist. Even faced with such competitors, many publishers and authors continued to mask their commercial aspirations, asserting that real literature rose above the marketplace.7 In poetry, Joseph Harrington argues, at the turn of the twentieth century, populist, genteel, and elite poetics all agreed that poetry’s functions were transcendent: to

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transmit value, order society, discipline subjectivity, and give sacredness to modern life. The differences among layers concerned who would have access to poetry’s uplift and by what means.8 Forgetting and Remembering Nineteenth-Century American Poetry To take on the recuperation of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry for readers today demands a confrontation with the uncertain disciplinary status of nineteenth-century American poetry. Over the twentieth century, no nineteenth-century American poet held a secure place in the canons of either American literature or poetry in English, with the exceptions of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. In a 1996 article, Joseph Harrington asks: Why is American poetry not American literature?9 His response describes how twentieth-century critics twice filtered poetry out of American literature. From the 1930s through the 1960s, New Criticism eliminated all but elite poetics, and in the succeeding decades, historicism and cultural criticism rejected the poetics that New Criticism had sanctioned. The contest over poetry’s readership at the turn of the twentieth century was implicitly gendered, since throughout the nineteenth century women had figured prominently in the production and consumption of genteel culture. By 1940 New Criticism, emphasizing formal craft to limit “true” poetry’s audience to readers trained in managing its difficulty, had declared elite, and masculinist, poetics the winner of this contest. The victory, in truth, was limited to academia, as William Harmon’s 1992 anthology The Top Five Hundred Poems makes evident.10 Harmon used Granger’s Index to Poetry, a record now nearly a century old, to collect the five hundred most frequently published poems in English.11 The nineteenth-century American poems that made the list reflect a hodgepodge of modes of canonization, extending far beyond academic criteria. Fourteen Dickinson poems cluster near “The Purple Cow,” Emerson’s poems lead into Eugene Field’s whimsical children’s rhymes, and Poe’s most popular verse follows “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.”12 Comparing anthologies from the beginning, middle, and end of the twentieth century, we see the effects of the phases of exclusion that Harrington describes. In 1900, Edmund Clarence Stedman, in his introduction to An American Anthology, drew a picture of American literature and poetry’s place in it that differs sharply from the canon established by the mid–twentieth century. Poetry, he claims, was the leading American liter-

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ary form from the 1830s into the 1870s.13 His selections include leading and minor poets, men and women, with biographical sketches at the end of the book. The generation that flourished from 1830 to 1860 wrote what he calls “poetry of conviction”—didactic poetry of nature, sentiment, and religion. He notes a few exceptions—poets devoted to “beauty and feeling,” among whom he lists Poe, Whitman, and Lanier—but he insists that the era’s didactic and political poetry also had much beauty, defending it against the view that it is inferior to British poetry.14 For Stedman, the value of American poetry owes to “its might as the voice of the people,” its being a force “originative of thought and deed.”15 The practice of poetry for its own sake, disconnected from public trends and events, was established in the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century, according to Stedman, and dominates his extensive postbellum collection. He expresses concern that form may have come to outstrip substance, and that poets have not kept up with the growth of a mass readership or, conversely, that the public fails to respond to “good” poetry. The establishment of literature as an academic field seems to Stedman a hopeful indicator of poetry’s future readership.16 Stedman thus traces the formation of aesthetic autonomy in American poetry and its accompanying loss of social effectiveness while anticipating the twentieth-century transfer of poetic readership into the specialized scene of academia. He also marks a pivotal moment of modernism when poetry written and judged by Americans would begin to dominate the canon in English.17 The Oxford Book of American Verse (1950), edited by F. O. Matthiessen, opens with the colonial period and extends through the first half of the twentieth century. Matthiessen emphasizes “key poets” as the objects of study but omits biographical data, detaching the poetry from the historical particulars of its production and reception. Modernist poets, twenty-four men and five women, take up the bulk of his collection, reflecting his judgment that American poetry began to come into its own around 1910. The nineteenth-century poets he includes, nineteen men and Emily Dickinson, have survived a silencing of poetry’s public voice that Matthiessen describes violently—his aim is to “wring the neck of the kind of rhetoric that overflowed into poetry from the oratory of the day.”18 The self-righteous abolitionist poems of Whittier and others are, for Matthiessen, the worst offenders. Although he acknowledges the public purpose of antebellum

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poetry, he rates all as below Poe and Whitman, whom he situates as precursors to twentieth-century poets. Despite the widespread aestheticism that Stedman saw in his account of postbellum poetry, Matthiessen contends that the “violently expanding postwar era” was unpropitious for poetry.19 Agreeing with the Southern Agrarian New Critics of his own time, he features southern white men (such as Henry Timrod) whose topic was the death of the South.20 The Heath Anthology of American Literature, first published in 1990 and in its third edition by 1997, reflects the reenvisioning of American literature driven by recuperative scholarship on multiethnic and women’s writing.21 Though its selection of antebellum poetry is scanty, this edition makes productive innovations. A section titled “The Emergence of American Poetic Voices” opens with slave and white folk lyrics, setting a framework of oral performance for the selections that follow, where Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Frances Osgood have been added to the familiar inclusions of Bryant, Longfellow, Whitman, and Dickinson. Other verse appears amid prose under section titles that reflect social issues. Emerson’s and Margaret Fuller’s poetry and prose are presented under “Explorations of an ‘American Self ’” alongside Ojibwe and African American autobiographers; Whittier and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper appear under the heading “Issues and Visions in Pre–Civil War America.” The Heath thus restores value to the public voice that Matthiessen deplored, reaching beyond Stedman not only through its multiethnic emphasis but also by capturing a contextual dimension of antebellum poetry that the presentation of poetry texts alone cannot offer. Few American writers of this era wrote poetry alone, and the periodical press in which writers such as Harper and Whittier built their careers engaged in argumentation about public issues. Interestingly, in its first two editions, the cultural-historical framework of the Heath continued the suppression of postbellum poetry evident in Matthiessen’s anthology, although an African American writer, James Weldon Johnson, replaced southern white men as the representative figure leading into modernism. The third edition, however, includes a new section drawn from Bennett’s Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets titled “A Sheaf of Women’s Poetry,” representing the works of twenty writers. That the number of postbellum women poets now far outweighs the number of postbellum men poets is symptomatic of

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the Heath’s acute link to cutting-edge scholarly projects; it also implies that projects concentrating on women’s poetry have laid important groundwork for the revitalization of nineteenth-century American poetry as a whole. The largest and broadest selection of nineteenth-century American poetry now available is in John Hollander’s Library of America edition, American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (1993).22 The anthology offers no introductory overview of the field. Instead, the dust jacket and extensive scholarly apparatus set the tone of the collection, making claims of authenticity, authority, and comprehensiveness. The inclusion of oral materials from white, African American, and Native American sources supports the dust jacket’s claim of recapturing the heterogeneous vitality of the past. Implicitly challenging the restrictions of a literary-critical narrative such as Matthiessen’s, Hollander’s collection seems framed as an opening gambit in the renovation of the field from a cultural-historical standpoint. Its selection of women’s poetry is less than adequate, however; only about onefifth of the poets included are women, although historically the gender division was closer to fifty-fifty; and the sparse representation of antebellum women’s careers (three or fewer poems for each writer) tends to minimize the influence of antebellum women’s culture on American poetics. Despite the efforts of Hollander and the editors of the Heath anthology, nineteenth-century American poetry still belonged only marginally to the academic category “poetry” by the end of the twentieth century. The selection of American poets in the 1996 edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry largely follows Matthiessen’s pattern, situating Emerson, Longfellow, Poe, and Melville as the leading figures at a rank below Whitman and Dickinson and giving scant attention to postbellum careers.23 Although the 1996 Norton holds Dickinson higher than Matthiessen did, other women still have only a token presence before modernism; the Norton includes only Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” among its American offerings. Race remains an invisible topos; no poets of color and no abolitionist poems are included. The two poems by Whittier are on other topics. Yet one need not search beyond the hoariest, most filtered canon to find evidence of American poetry’s imbrication with the racial structure. William Cullen Bryant’s meditation on death, “Thanatopsis” (1817), ap-

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pears in all of the above anthologies and many more. “Thanatopsis” is commonly read as a superior American entry in Romantic pantheism.24 Though it purports to be a nature poem, it redeems nature by making the earth everywhere “the great tomb” of an active, teeming civilization. The realm of the dead, described in the words of myth and legend, is like a library of heroic ideals, noble characters, and romance narratives: Thou shalt lie down With patriarchs of the infant world—with kings, The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good, Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, All in one mighty sepulchre. (ll. 33–7)25

The experience of death reconciles the individual not with nature but with what nature stores, a reimagined human past, the past of the elite tradition. Writing before American print culture began its rapid growth into an independent industry and a popular medium, Bryant avoids giving the precursor world any specific national or racial identity; it holds all of the dead, globally. By marking the extreme points of its reach with wilderness areas in western Africa (“the Barcan wilderness”) and the Pacific Northwest (“the Oregon”), Bryant at once incorporates African and Native American sites into his realm of the dead and depopulates these areas of living racial others—a multiculturalist project gone wrong. Bryant’s geographic generalizing loosens his debt to British and European nobility, but the concluding stanza folds in the kind of gesture Morrison says is characteristic of American literary whiteness: the exemplary self is moralized upon in opposition to the disdained condition of enslavement. Slavery and labor provide the model for dying badly, while wealth and ease, a reconstructed discipline of gentility, characterize the model for dying well and even for joining the memorial narrative of the dead: So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan, which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed

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By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.(ll. 73–81)

Evidence of American poetry’s entanglement with race at the other end of the century comes from Burgess’s “The Purple Cow,” a poem reprinted just as frequently as “Thanatopsis” though in different kinds of venues. First published in Burgess’s bohemian little magazine The Lark with a title nearly as long as the poem—“THE PURPLE COW’s projected feast / Reflections on a Mythic Beast / Who’s Quite Remarkable, at Least”—the quatrain quickly and enduringly circulated like a folk poem, transmitted orally altogether disengaged from its author’s name, its title, and its first printing. The quatrain’s print contexts provide evidence of its embeddedness in the racial structure. It was published with an illustration in which a huge, bounding cow pursues her projected feast, a hapless, naked man, both silhouettes in black ink (fig. 1). “The Purple Cow” shares the pages of The Burgess Nonsense Book (1901) with “ELIZABETH: A Gloomy Story, / (Perhaps it is an Allegory),” another illustrated quatrain, which efficiently conflates female literary consumption with racial stereotype (fig. 2): There was a Girl. Her name was Liza. She Drank Black Ink. For an Appetizer. She Grew so Thirsty. As she Grew Bigger. That now that Girl. Is a Regular Nigger.26

The one stanza of “The Purple Cow,” together with its illustration, defines a mythical beast that is a multiple other. This threatening, consummatory other—feminized, at once agrarian and decadent, colored the black of Africanism and the purple of the genteel—could signify the nineteenth century.27 Women’s Culture, Women’s Poetry A compelling paradox for feminist literary studies is that the historical developments folded into the term “modernity”—democratization, urbanization, industrialization, the growth of commerce, and the middle class’s rise to dominance—produced the conditions for both the formation of the ideology of separate gendered spheres, which placed pressure on women to oversee a privacy exempt from modernity, and women’s entry into the pub-

1. Eden awry; man meets bovine amid genteel decor. F. Gellett Burgess, The Burgess Nonsense Book (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1901) 24-5.

2. The allegory of Elizabeth: othering literary consumption. Burgess 95.

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lic sphere in unprecedented numbers, mediated through print. In nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, these issues manifest themselves quite differently than they do in British women’s poetry, largely because of differences in the ways “nation” was conceived in relation to class structure, race, and geographical space. The mission of constructing and defining a national community was new in the United States. While the American national project was continuous with the Old World’s development of political liberties centered on religious freedom, it also entailed geographical and cultural displacement. In England, Victorian medievalism invoked the idea of a garden tended by organically entwined social ranks—a nostalgic picture of feudalism—to nourish hopes of national healing in the face of modernity’s disruptions. Nostalgia looked different in the United States: Underlying the American idea of “home” was a voluminous and heterogeneous record of exile over vast distances; and the telling of “our” story of exile into freedom involved forgetting, ignoring, appropriating, or marginalizing “their” story, particularly the stories of slavery and tribal displacement. “Home” had to be fabricated for American culture, and community to be invented over large and expanding distances; these were needs that gave the American print culture a vitality and urgency specific to its national scene. These missions were consistent with women’s prescribed roles, and were the basis on which women editors, writers, and readers formed a distinctive female public sphere through print. Thus, while Enlightenment thought and the conditions of modernity nurtured changes in the status of women in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, as well as in the United States, the particulars of American cultural time and space (newness, vastness) supported women’s engagement in print culture to a degree that was elsewhere unmatched.28 In her influential book Women of the Republic (1980), Linda Kerber discusses revolutionary-era American women’s development of a concept of active female political agency which she terms “republican motherhood.” Kerber locates the philosophical roots of this concept in Locke, who integrated women into social theory by taking the family as an analogy for the state.29 The republican mother’s roles in assuring the health of the republic were to educate her children to civic virtue and to condemn and correct her husband’s departures from it.30 Rational, benevolent, disciplined, and selfreliant, the republican mother, in her daily spiritual battle for public virtue, embodied an ideological solution to anxieties about the democratic masses:

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if the anonymous populace could not be trusted with the custodianship of civil morality, they would be brought under the guidance of an idealized mother.31 The illustrations reproduced in Women of the Republic indicate that, through the allegorical figures Columbia and Liberty, stalwart maternal figures were merged with the very idea and identity of the nation. In the early years of the republic, the male public sphere increasingly relied on written communication and on the social extension and critical awareness that literacy enables: wide networking, access to viewpoints other than the local, and skepticism about local opinions. At the same time, with white women’s literacy about half that of men’s in 1780, women’s culture remained largely premodern—local, oral, and explicitly gendered in a way that print culture, though implicitly masculine, was not, since print distanced communications from bodily presence.32 Because public virtue required the service of wives and mothers who were well informed, methodical, and in control of their passions, Kerber points out, the ideal of republican motherhood provided the impetus for bringing women’s culture into modernity through education. Republican motherhood also exempted educated women from being derided as “bluestockings,” since their learning was not a frivolous escape from family duties but a patriotic responsibility.33 The rapid growth in white women’s literacy during the first half of the nineteenth century—so that by 1850 their literacy rate equalled the 90 percent rate for white men—reflects improvements in women’s education between 1780 and 1830.34 From about 1820 to 1870, an alternative, female public sphere thrived in print under the leadership of women editors and contributed to the burgeoning of American publishing.35 Its mission complemented that of the male public sphere but adapted values associated with women’s lives to public discourse. In forging the stories and icons of national identity, women writers and editors gave primacy to everyday life and built networks of community—centered on women and children—over the expanding geographical spread of Euro-American culture. By midcentury, according to Susan Coultrap-McQuin, women writers showed great confidence in their calling. Despite a backlash against their prominence in the literary marketplace—instances such as Hawthorne’s famous snarl about “that damned mob of scribbling women”— women continued to publish, directing their wits against such detractions.36 The legacy of republican motherhood for the generations succeeding the

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early republican era could be turned to either conservative or progressive ends. The ideal of “true womanhood,” a feminine nobility reconstructed for the bourgeois gentry, extended republican motherhood’s role as a bulwark against lower-class participation in democracy. At the same time, however, the radical vanguard of female print culture, predating and leading into the women’s rights movement, overstepped genteel restraints by advancing a distinctive female abolitionism. The rhetoric of female abolitionism exploited—sometimes critically—the gap between the debased, embodied status of enslaved women and the status of white women as subjects and agents to publicize the spiritual merits of opposing slavery. Morrison writes of a white woman “gathering identity into herself from the wholly available and serviceable lives of Africanist others.”37 This in effect is what occurred at the nexus of female abolitionism and women’s public culture, as Jean Fagan Yellin and Karen Sanchez-Eppler have discussed at length.38 Adopting sympathetic commonality among women as its ethical center, female abolitionism monitored the morality of the slave state by proxy, through the bodies of slave women. By the 1850s, the women abolitionists’ emphasis on the condition of women, children, and families in slavery helped to transform abolitionism into a popular movement. Drawing on existing structures of feeling, female abolitionism exploded the limits of localized communities of discourse and specialized periodicals to enter popular culture with history-making force. The most prominent example of female abolitionism’s impact on American popular culture is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), first serialized in the moderate abolitionist paper National Era and, in book form, a record-setting bestseller with three hundred thousand sold in the first year. Less visibly, although no less pervasively, as Sanchez-Eppler argues, the problematics of gender, race, embodiment, and freedom that women abolitionists explored became integral to the American lyric.39 In complex ways, the destinies of female abolitionism and women’s print culture were intertwined. Following emancipation, abolitionist groups kept their structures long enough to organize educational and economic aid during Reconstruction, then dissolved as their members turned to other involvements. At the same time, women’s print culture had begun to lose its definition and influence as a counter-public sphere. In part, this decline stemmed from the increasing masculinism of postbellum expertise culture. By organizing knowledge and public practices into specialized pro-

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fessions whose success depended upon the ability to compete aggressively in the marketplace, the new expertise culture undermined the critical and cultural roles that women had established during the antebellum era. But the depoliticization of women’s print culture also occurred as the principles it inherited from republican motherhood gave way to increasingly commercial, popular cultural modes of literary production. Republican motherhood had merged the domestic domain with civic responsibility in forging its ideal of female citizenship and thus worked against the strict gendered separation of spheres. Genteel women’s culture, in shying away from political strategies and aims—particularly those that threatened to divide the nation and thus the market—reinstated a divide between public and private. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book from 1837 to 1877 and a leading figure in this dominant branch of women’s public culture, promoted the domestic sphere as a utopian space of human wellbeing, to which men, she believed, had proven themselves hostile. In protecting the moral superiority of female subjects, Hale asked them to curtail their economic citizenship; yet to distance oneself from “masculine” roles in the competitive marketplace was to comply with the roles of consumer and mannequin of class status. While insisting that women should forget the sordid affairs of money, Hale urged them, through the illustrated pages of Godey’s, to refine their taste in clothing and decor.40 The demise of antebellum women’s culture was not total, nor was it altogether disabling for female authors. Lacking a haven dedicated to gender essentialism, literary women faced the need to struggle with the “sordid affairs of money” and the wider system of culture-making. Reviewing the century in 1900, Edmund Clarence Stedman saw American women’s poetry come into its own during the postbellum era. In The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (1977), Emily Stipes Watts describes a group of postbellum women poets whose “growing awareness of . . . the relationship of prosodic structure and meaning” was carrying them toward modernism, a “natural” development that, she claims, did not occur in men’s poetry.41 Yet this body of work disappeared as thoroughly as did that of antebellum women writers. The era of expertise edged women writers out of the processes by which literary works achieve a lasting place in cultural memory. Women published, but they were largely excluded from the collegial networks among publishers, critics, and academics through which enduring reputations, and thus literary canons, are made.42

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In the early decades of the twentieth century, literary critics continued the process of marginalizing women writers. That nineteenth-century American poetry as a genre was all but filtered out at the same time indicates the widespread influence women’s print culture had on American poetics. Stedman links poetry’s dominance of the literary marketplace with the decades in which women’s print culture flourished.43 According to Watts, in the antebellum period it was easier for women than for men to publish poetry. She cites Longfellow’s complaint in 1832 that the male public thinks poetry is “effeminate nonsense.” Watts argues that the commercial advantages of sentimentality persuaded male poets to conform to “effeminate” poetics.44 More is at work here, however, than men writing what would sell at the expense of their manhood. Ann Douglas notes “the highly ambivalent preoccupation of the male sentimentalists with feminine taste, even their partial feminization,” in a literary scene where writers lacked an established social role.45 Whatever one’s sex, to write poetry like a woman was to act out an instance of the shifting interplay between the construction of gender and the layering of cultural value. Indeed, in a broad theoretical sense, women’s poetry is integral to nineteenth-century poetics. The developments of modernity described above as shaping the growth of Romanticism and popular culture were precisely the conditions that opened poetic production to women and other social groups for whom elite education and patronage were inaccessible. Women’s poetry, popular culture, and high Romanticism, in other words, came to flourish together, under related sets of conditions, in dynamic interaction with one another. This is not to superimpose women’s poetry on either popular culture or Romanticism. Instead, it is to propose that any instance of a woman’s writing poems during this time bears marks of the conflicting and overlapping claims of popular and high art, marks that also indicate how these claims interacted with ideologies of gender. It is to propose, further, that any poetry—regardless of the gender of its author— written when popular print is a flourishing cultural force must contend with residual and emerging ideologies of gender as aspects of the classification and ranking of poetic works. In the United States as in Britain, women poets both contended against the excesses of male Romanticism and adopted its characteristic tropes. American women’s print culture, however, provided a shelter for women poets’ experimentation and expression, as Watts argues, and a platform for

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challenges to the criteria of poetic value. In “Woman the Poet of Nature” (1837), Hale draws firm distinctions between women’s and men’s poetics, but she asserts that the poetry of women, focused on “impressions of the Beautiful and the Good,” “the love of truth and nature,” and “faith in God,” should set the standard for all true poetry.46 Such influential assertions, together with the sheer abundance of published poetry by women, cast doubt on the premises of earlier efforts by feminist critics to reconstruct the “tradition” of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry. In The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 (1982), Cheryl Walker identifies a tradition of vacillation about power in women’s poetry. Walker’s organizing metaphor is a bird whose song or flight fails; because of patriarchal imperatives that gendered poetic achievement masculine, she contends, American women poets experienced extraordinary difficulty writing poems.47 Still, the controlling tropes of vacillation and ambivalence Walker describes are prominent within the maledominated tradition of Romantic idealism. Rather than expressing women writers’ agony over the difficulty of writing in a feminized genre for a feminized marketplace, the strain of women’s poetics that Walker traced more likely marks American women’s experimentation with tropes that were already gendered through male Romantic poets’ appropriation of feminized literary concerns. Emerson figures true poetry as miswritten “primal warblings” in “The Poet” (1844),48 where he also attacks the taste of his contemporaries—the readers who supported the feminized literary marketplace. The themes of suffering and retreat that Walker identifies as feminine must be read as signs of struggle over competing poetic standards, of the changing legitimacy of print and face-to-face cultural performance, and of poetry’s general withdrawal into private interior spaces. Unrepresentative Dickinson: Contesting Cultural Capital Recuperative projects in nineteenth-century American women’s poetry must confront the case of Emily Dickinson, whose work creates special difficulties for any critic working to situate now-forgotten poets in relationship to her. Judging from Harmon’s discoveries about the most frequently reprinted poems, Dickinson is the most securely canonical of all women poets in English—the only one, American or British, whose works have been anthologized as often as those of forty-five men, from Thomas Wyatt to Randall Jarrell. A disturbing fact surrounding Dickinson’s canonization

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during the first half of the twentieth century, however, is that other women writers disappeared from anthologies at the same time that her poems appeared, until by midcentury she was virtually the only woman writer in the canon of nineteenth-century American literature. Matthiessen’s Oxford Book of American Verse is a touchstone in this process: he preserves only Dickinson between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Approaching poetry through recuperative scholarship and its critical recognition that the very criteria of value used to sort poems into those that must be remembered and those that should be forgotten serve the purposes of unequal social structures, we cannot take for granted that the reason only Dickinson endured was that she was great and no other woman poet was. In Becoming Canonical in American Poetry, Timothy Morris offers an explanation for Dickinson’s endurance that foregrounds gender as a factor in the making of a formalist literary canon. He relates the token adoption of Dickinson to the masculinization of the canon as American literature became an academic discipline during the 1930s. The critics who influenced the formation of the academic canon regarded the values promoted by nineteenth-century women’s literary culture as antithetical to the masculine toughness needed to fortify a modern world power. Morris conjectures that, because she did not publish and was dead before her works entered critical discourse, Dickinson posed no such threat.49 As early as 1896, critic Harry Lyman Koopman had celebrated Dickinson as a voice of feminine truth free of the support networks of women’s culture.50 Dickinson seemed the exception to nineteenth-century commonplaces about women, from their sexual unavailability to their prominence in the literary scene. Through her secret poems, Morris speculates, Dickinson seemed “to reach out to the virile male” who arrived in his carriage, like the macabre suitor in “Because I could not stop for Death,” to rescue her from “immurement in the culture of ladylike gentility.”51 Whether or not it makes sense to locate Dickinson’s posthumous career in her own imagery, that possibility has tantalized readers since the publication of the first volume of her work. Her poetry has been and continues to be repeatedly rescued from earlier readings and abducted into new critical contexts. Readings of Dickinson’s poetry contributed to New Criticism’s fetishization of the formal structure of the poetic text. But revisionary readings of her work also helped to forge the premises of early feminist literary criticism devoted to reconstructing a “women’s tradition,” a project that, by

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1980, became organized around a narrative of progress toward feminism. In both critical frameworks, Dickinson’s status as a representative figure depended upon the unrepresentative nature of her life and works. Situating Dickinson in an account of the dangers women experienced in writing poetry, Cheryl Walker followed the lead of Adrienne Rich (1977) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1980), taking Dickinson as an exemplary figure who found ways to use the destructive power of poetry to oppose patriarchy.52 For Walker as well as Watts, Dickinson’s work remained at an elevated level of “genius” that stands as the measure of others’ lesser achievements. As late as 1986, Alicia Suskin Ostriker could almost totally dismiss “the large white fog” of nineteenth-century women’s poetry: “The poetess as we know and despise her is the creation of post-Revolution America.”53 Recent scholarship on Dickinson has included efforts to place her amid her publishing contemporaries without rejecting them as the mediocrity that proves the genius. New readings of forgotten nineteenth-century women writers have cast doubt on the treatment of Dickinson as an exemplary rebel against patriarchalism. Joanne Dobson shows that nineteenthcentury women writers had a multitude of strategies for opposing conventional gender roles and many took great risks in their lives and writing. In contrast, Dickinson’s life appears almost fanatically conventional.54 Betsy Erkkila argues that Dickinson’s very resistance to patriarchy was grounded in class privilege and linked to her opposition to the literary marketplace. Dickinson’s methods, Erkkila argues, reinforced her elite status: stitching together her manuscripts, she engaged in “a precapitalist mode of manuscript production,” and “publishing” her poems in letters to friends was an aristocratic form of circulation.55 Other critics have regarded Dickinson’s retrograde “publishing” practices as a critique of the marketplace. Martha Nell Smith, for example, argues that Dickinson’s self-made “books” present a radical alternative to commercial publishing.56 But for Erkkila, this “radicalism” had an ironic effect: “she, like other Romantic poets, ended by enforcing the separation of art and society and the corresponding feminization, trivialization, and marginalization of art.”57 Dobson’s and Erkkila’s work suggests that Dickinson can only be viewed as an exemplary protofeminist subject within the narrow terms of elite poetics: the ideas that authentic poetry is a solitary, internal art, that a poet is an exceptionally gifted person who rises above the literary marketplace, and that poetry is a discipline unto itself, answerable only to its own formal rules.

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Read in relation to conflicts and debates about poetic value, very much of Dickinson’s opus is reducible to obsessively recircling high-aesthetic concerns: poetic immortality, vocational election, the working out of a masterful subjectivity through erotic passion. Dickinson’s critical stock is unlikely to fall as other women writers’ stock rises; her canonicity held momentum as her poems moved among a multitude of reading sites and theoretical platforms throughout the twentieth century. The problem of what to do about her membership in the larger category of nineteenth-century American women poets, however, raises difficult questions. What is at stake in producing a Dickinson who is like other women poets, and what is at stake in proliferating a Dickinson who is distinctive, different? Do reading strategies that vivify other women’s poetry, when turned to Dickinson’s work, dim its aura? Does the current emphasis in Dickinson scholarship on studying her manuscripts and fascicles work as a hedge against legitimizing the study of writers whose poems are available to us only in print? Even projects dedicated to drawing Dickinson into a cultural-historical framework contribute to the most prominent feature of difference: discursively, Dickinson is gigantic. She is an agora where academic subjects are made. In its thematic concerns and formal experimentation, Dickinson’s work lies well within the elite tradition as reconstructed through modernism, but it has not been only elite venues that canonized her or elite readers who value her work, nor have literary professionals strictly controlled how she is read. Harmon’s “top five hundred poems” provide signs of this diverse readership: of the fourteen Dickinson poems included in his collection, all but one were among the poems edited and published in the nineteenth century, indicating that, before academics began discussing Dickinson in the 1930s, a genteel, nonacademic readership had already set a mini-canon of her work which endures today.58 Dickinson’s diverse readership—genteel and popular, masculinist and feminist, primary and postgraduate— suggests that identifying her work strictly with elite culture is an oversimplification. Further, her case suggests that broad accounts of nineteenthcentury American poetry should not simply sort poems into hierarchical layers of valuation, but should also trace the interflow among different cultural layers—folk, popular, elite; low-, middle-, and highbrow—and the contests over value surrounding both the initial composition and reception of poems and their being forgotten or remembered through specific read-

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ing venues. In large part, such a study would be a tracing of historical shifts in subjectivity across categories of identity—race, gender, class, region. Who needs poetry, what kinds of poetry, and to what ends? My aim below in offering readings of poems is not to say what they really mean; I believe Dickinson studies now would benefit far more from critical historical accounts of the uses readers, including ourselves now, make of her poems than from more interpretive readings. Rather, my aim is to experiment with variant readings that bring out what is problematic about approaching her work in the context of recuperative scholarship. Two of Dickinson’s poems that are most repellent of auratic readings when seen in a cultural-historical framework help to illuminate the pivotal phase of nineteenth-century American poetry when, as Stedman put it, poetry of conviction gave way to poetry of beauty. “Publication–is the Auction” ( J 709, F 709, c. late 1863) and “The Malay took the Pearl” ( J 452, F 451, c. late 1862) also mark the chronological divide between antebellum and postbellum, and the discursive divide between literary whiteness constituted in relation to slavery and, after emancipation, in relation to racial modernity. Stedman regarded the Civil War era as a pause, a period inauspicious for poetry. Watts makes the case that women’s and men’s poetry differed least during the Civil War, when all pens were turned to the cause of North or South. Two lyrics by women, Elizabeth Akers Allen’s “Rock Me to Sleep” and Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—both of which cross voices between feminine and masculine—soared to enduring popularity, first sung around Union campfires. At the same time, Dickinson was forging her poetics of the internal, having her most prolific year in 1862. “Publication–is the Auction,” the more familiar of the two poems, is often discussed in classrooms and critical texts to account for the sensational paradox that a great poet became known only after her death. Dobson relates this poem to Dickinson’s rejection of the kinds of print careers pursued by other women writers of her time. The need to earn money and a commitment to a religious cause were commonly accepted justifications for women’s publishing, Dobson points out, and Dickinson begrudgingly allows these exceptions:59 Publication–is the Auction Of the Mind of Man–

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Poverty–be justifying For so foul a thing Possibly . . . . . . –Be the Merchant Of the Heavenly Grace– But reduce no Human Spirit To Disgrace of Price–

Still, the need for money and the promotion of a cause could characterize much antebellum poetry by men as well as women; we need not read “woman” behind Dickinson’s generic masculine “Mind of Man.” The poem’s attitude toward publishing knots many converging threads: Romanticism’s struggle to differentiate between “the people” and “the public,”60 to claim folk roots while distancing itself from the marketplace; American genteel publishers’ ambivalence about submitting to marketplace demands; the traditions of elite, noncommercial poetic circulation that Erkkila describes. These trends converge, however, in a figure appropriated from the abolitionist condemnation of trade in human bodies. Morrison writes that Euro-American thinkers assumed the slave population “offered itself up as surrogate selves for meditation on problems of human freedom . . . in terms other than the abstractions of human potential and the rights of man.” She lists alternate “terms” captured in Africanist metaphors: “the terror of European outcasts, their dread of failure, powerlessness, Nature without limits, natal loneliness, internal aggression, evil, sin, greed.”61 To this list, “Publication–is the Auction” adds revulsion against commercial culture. Dickinson’s embroiling slavery in this defining stroke of poetic autonomy makes clear that literary whiteness, too, is at stake. In the second stanza, Dickinson emphatically repeats her preference for whiteness: . . . We–would rather From Our Garret go White–Unto the White Creator– Than invest–Our Snow–

Elizabeth Petrino sets this poem in the context of the courtly erotics of the relationship between gentlemen publishers and women writers whose

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works they “fathered.”62 The figure is that of entering the cloister: choosing to be a virginal bride of God rather than a prostitute. But the contrasting image it raises is one often used by the abolitionist press to arouse abhorrence of the slave trade: a woman’s body—raced black though often lightskinned to enhance the horror of the scene for white readers, and sometimes half-stripped—exposed to sexual exploitation. At once embodying the poetic text as feminine and effacing the body at risk in whiteness, Dickinson also conflates God, the audience, and the aesthetic maker in the “White Creator”; the purity of literary whiteness depends upon delimiting readership to the self-artist-god. More disturbingly direct in its presentation of the Africanist figure is “The Malay–took the Pearl”: The Malay–took the Pearl– Not–I–the Earl– I–feared the Sea–too much Unsanctified–to touch– Praying that I might be Worthy–the Destiny– The Swarthy fellow swam– And bore my Jewel–Home– Home to the Hut! What lot Had I–the Jewel–got– Borne on a Dusky Breast– I had not deemed a Vest Of Amber–fit– The Negro never knew I–wooed it–too– To gain, or be undone– Alike to Him–One–

If we were to try to situate the drama in this poem historically, given Franklin’s approximation of the date of its composition as late 1862, we might read it as a response to Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862—the moment when the Civil War became officially “about” slavery—and the pearl at stake would be freedom. The

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poem would then capture a consequence of women’s rights arguments based on claims that “free” women’s subjection to male dominance was equivalent to slavery: “freedom” becomes a trophy over which subjects of two different forms of oppression must compete. Read in this way, “The Malay–took the Pearl” seems attuned to conflicts within the abolitionist and women’s rights movements over which cause took priority, and prescient of the racism that would infect postbellum suffrage arguments: degraded (black and immigrant) men have the vote but genteel (white, Anglo-Saxon) women do not. But this is not a poem about the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation or the vote. As Shira Wolosky63 and Karen Sanchez-Eppler have pointed out, Dickinson’s poems resist and internalize social-historical meanings. For Sanchez-Eppler, references to public debates in Dickinson’s poems raise the question of “what becomes of the public call for emancipation once it has been remade into an internal and distinctly personal concern.”64 In My Life a Loaded Gun (1986), Paula Bennett reads the competition for the pearl as part of the story of Dickinson’s sexual passion for her sister-inlaw Susan, part of the larger story of Dickinson’s challenge to phallocentrism from behind a shield of parodic conformity to gender norms.65 The pearl fits well into an array of images Bennett has identified as clitoral symbols in nineteenth-century women’s poetry.66 To figure Austin Dickinson, or the phallus, as a “Negro” in this scenario, however, is to raise the image of the black rapist of white women—a specter so instrumental in justifying oppression and genocide, and particularly in displacing the assault on black women’s reproductive autonomy that was endemic to slavery, that its presence here can reverberate through one’s reading of Dickinson’s work, overturning its “internal and distinctly personal” pleasures.67 Alfred Habegger finds the readings that key the figures in this poem to Dickinson and the people close to her both too literal and too allegorical, and suggests that the earl and the black man are two sides of an ambivalent subject, an interpretation that seems quite plausible.68 My point here, however, is not to locate Dickinson herself in this poem, but to unpack the figurative uses the poem makes of the Africanist other. Mary Loeffelholz’s discussion of gem imagery suggests that cultural capital in a broad sense is at stake: gemstones refer to epochal conflicts among men for objects of the highest value, including idealized women, so at issue is who will own history and value.69 I will narrow the scope of the cultural

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capital in “The Malay–took the Pearl” to poetics, however, and call it a poem about possessing the gift of poetry, a common topos of the elite tradition. Dickinson’s exoticized conflation of the “Negro” with the “Malay” apparently refers to a passage in Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater and suggests that poetic intoxication is at stake.70 De Quincey tells of offering a visiting “Malay” a farewell gift of a triple dose of opium. As unceremoniously as Dickinson’s Malay seizes the pearl, de Quincey’s visitor puts his life at risk by devouring all of the opium, then departing.71 The context of the fascicle into which Dickinson bound “The Malay–took the Pearl,” numbered 21 by R. W. Franklin, further reinforces reading it as a poem about poetry. Scholarship on reading the fascicles, spurred by Franklin’s 1982 publication of the facsimile edition, does not make a case for Dickinson’s having intended thematic unity or narrative sequence in her organization of the manuscript books.72 However, this scholarship has shown that readings responding to the movement of images and themes throughout a fascicle produce an overall texture of resonance and meaning. With some departures, fascicle 21 has a coherent overall movement from isolation and obscurity to poetic vocation. Poems of exile ( J 609, “I Years had been from Home”) and death ( J 610, “You’ll find–it when you try to die”; J 611, “I see thee better–in the Dark”; J 447, “Could–I do more–for Thee”), and complaints about deprivation and confinement ( J 612, “It would have starved a Gnat”; J 613, “They shut me up in Prose”) work as an entry into the subject of poetry. From the complaint about being confined in prose, the fascicle turns specifically to the topic of poetry in the elegy for Elizabeth Barrett Browning ( J 448, “This was a Poet–it is That”). The next poem, “In falling Timbers buried” ( J 614), reverts to death and confinement but also links the elegy to “I died for beauty–but was scarce” ( J 449). Here a Keatsian pair, one dead for beauty and the other for truth, meet in their graves, discover their kinship, and are forgotten; the anxiety is that poetry, like the figure under falling timbers, will be buried alive. With “Dreams–are well–but Waking’s better” ( J 450), Dickinson seems to repudiate the Keatsian imagination, demanding a daytime consequence to dreams. “The outer–from the Inner” ( J 451) makes claims for the agency of the internal through the sublime. Dickinson inserted a small earlier poem between 451 and “The Malay–took the Pearl”—“At last, to be identified” ( J 174). Following “The Malay–took the Pearl” comes “Love–thou

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art high” ( J 453), then the fascicle closes with poems of triumph, endowment, and entitlement ( J 615, “Our journey had advanced”; J 616, “I rose– because He sank”; J 454, “It was given to me by the Gods”). “It was given to me by the Gods” especially links to “The Malay–took the Pearl,” figuring possession of a divinely endowed gift through class and wealth. Thomas H. Johnson suggests as an inspiration for “The Malay–took the Pearl” lines in Robert Browning’s Paracelsus, an image of a diver who enters the water a beggar and emerges a prince.73 But Dickinson puts aside the class mobility that Browning’s figure implies; beggar and prince are two different people, the “Malay” and the “earl,” and possession of the treasure has gone astray, inverting the association between rank and wealth. Key to reading this poem as a point of nexus between socially engaged and aesthetic poetics, and as an opening gambit in postslavery literary whiteness, is the difference in the ways the speaker and the dark other approach and value the pearl. For the speaker, the pearl has the quality of a sacred fetish; she approaches it with ritualized caution in an effort to raise her own worth. Yet she identifies the lost pearl as already hers (“my Jewel”), and the condensed diction blurs the difference between speaker and object of desire (“What lot / Had I–the Jewel”). The speaker insists that she would have treated the pearl as an object of ineffable value. Representationally, a “vest of Amber” would be a yellow dickey worn to decorate the neckline of a dress, an accessory that might well have pearls attached to it. But “vest of Amber” also bears the double, paradoxical implication of preservation—a life preserver made of hardened sap. Life is to be saved through death and reification. Even such a garment, however, would not be a “fit” or sufficiently rare background for the pearl, despite all it adds to the ritual of elite value. The black figure, in contrast, simply acts without hesitation, showing no sign that he feels a need to prepare himself. The speaker disparages the black man’s handling of the pearl, but the closing lines—“To gain, or be undone– / Alike to Him–One”—convey desperate stakes, those of radical liberatory action such as Nat Turner’s or John Brown’s: win or die. Turned back to the era before emancipation, this reading focuses the poem’s complaint on the investment of cultural capital in political causes, specifically in the abolition of slavery. Turned forward to racial modernity, it registers anxiety about African American access to cultural capital. Dramatizing the loss of the pearl, however, Dickinson paradoxically stages a victory for aesthetic poetry while sketching anew an outline of literary

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whiteness in resistance to the victorious Africanist other. Amid the loss, a moment of fullness occurs in the overstuffed, five-line third stanza: “Borne on a Dusky Breast.” Dickinson uses the imaginary amber vest to devalue and ironize the image of a dark, naked swimmer, but her contorted syntax, as is so often the case in her lines, keeps alternate readings near the surface. Being “borne on a dusky breast” is an image of both abduction and maternal or foster-maternal care; if the pearl is both cultural capital—poetry— and the voice of the poem, this abduction-nurture amounts to an act of reading. The amber vest, a negative, life-in-death measure of the fit venue for the pearl, also distances the poem from the fullness of embodied touching. Literary whiteness here requires a rejection of embodiment; translated to modes of cultural transmission, it privileges a ritualized and fetishistic treatment of texts over body-to-body exchange. But these losses—of the sacred, of the fetish, of undifferentiated bodily union—are precisely the driving structures of feeling of aesthetic lyric: “Possession and the positing of the desired object in words are absolutely antithetical endeavors.”74 With “The Malay–took the Pearl,” Dickinson wins the contest for control of poetry’s themes. Far from being a unique, solitary victor, Dickinson in this reading is representative: representative of the role of the changing racial structure in constructing poetry’s autonomy.

II • ANTEBELLUM

3 “Skins May Differ” Women’s Republicanism and the Poetics of Abolitionism Th e a b o l i t i o n i s t movement as it took form during the 1830s and the female public culture that thrived in print from about 1820 to 1870 had in common that they both drew much of their critical passion from Christian millennialism, a force that helped to form the eighteenthcentury revolutionary spirit but that the nation’s founders had resisted in framing political issues through rationalism and the concept of natural rights. Both abolitionism and female republicanism conceived experience in terms of salvation and damnation and viewed the nation’s destiny in terms of its Christian fulfillment of history. For both, human affiliations had priority over individual rights; affective bonds between people shaped individual subjectivity, gave rise to historical agency, and dramatized ideological stress. Human relationships extended beyond the temporal, providing an incentive for individuals to attend to the condition of communities of souls, not just their own: death healed all breaches of affiliation, carrying the soul to a spiritual utopia where loved ones divided in life could become reunited. Such reunions, however, were reserved for the innocent and those who had been extricated from sin. The perception of wrong, too, was affective, felt as grief in sympathy with the victim; to weep for others was to express a saving self-transcendence.1 These tenets of religious sentimentality provided an alternative framework for civic practice for both abolitionism and female public culture.2 Breaks in their congruence, however, surrounded women’s roles in public media in relationship to gender norms and the politics of nationhood. In the 1830s, whether and how women might participate in public life was a question that absorbed both sides of the sectional debate over slavery. White women as idealized cultural objects were central to the justification of slavery; yet as subjects both restricted and enabled by gender prescrip-

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tions, women also participated effectively in the movement to end slavery. With women’s increasing activism, an emphasis on representing women and children as sufferers of slavery’s wrongs developed early in radical abolitionist rhetoric. The imagery of victimization that accompanied this emphasis, by presenting opportunities to experience sympathy toward suffering bodies, framed slavery as an occasion for the spiritual growth of those who would oppose it. This abolitionist imagery, as Jean Fagan Yellin points out, also enhanced female republicanism by functioning as its reverse image, differentiating between the slaves’ helplessness and republican women’s agency, between speechlessness and command of language, between the slaves’ dependency on an oppressor and republican womanhood’s supposed interdependent complementarity with male political practice. By mobilizing the language of sentiment as an effective social force, abolitionist discourse provided a balance to—and thus, paradoxically, a justification for—women’s continuing exclusion from the occupational and political roles that constituted the male public sphere.3 Debates about the appropriate sphere for women heightened conflicts between women’s abolitionism and the more conservative forms of female republican practice. Glenna Matthews notes that masculine “virtue,” a driving principle of classical republicanism, had a split definition: goodness or morality and virility or power. Female republicanism generally appropriated the former definition while distancing itself from the latter.4 As national tensions over slavery heightened, radical women abolitionists increasingly transgressed the boundary between morality and politics. The divisions between women’s abolitionism and the wider female public culture are evident in the career of Sarah Josepha Hale, whose forty years as the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book (1837–1877) placed her among the most influential American women of the century. Hale took the view that women must address moral issues but must not engage in partisan politics or warmaking; practiced in this way, Hale believed, female public culture could heal sectional rivalry by melding a common sense of place through writing.5 Her opposition to women’s political agency extended to oratory: though her support for women writers was second to none, she firmly opposed women’s public speaking.6 In 1829 Hale wrote that women could appropriately publish on the morality of slavery, and as late as 1852 she wrote in support of the coloniza-

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tion movement, which promoted African American emigration to Liberia. She described her position as religious rather than political.7 Procolonization was not, however, a clear antislavery position. Black abolitionists had persuaded William Lloyd Garrison to withdraw his support from the Colonization Society early in his public career, and Lydia Maria Child subjected the movement to a thorough critique, exposing its racism and its compatibility with the slave system.8 Hale’s commitment to the pacification of conflicts that could threaten the republic’s unity ultimately eclipsed her “moral” objections to slavery. By the mid-1840s, Hale was actively purging her staff of the taint of activism; she fired junior editor Sarah Jane Lippincott (later well known under her pen name Grace Greenwood) for contributing to the abolitionist National Era. The absence of debate on slavery from Godey’s Lady’s Book and, later, the paucity of references to the Civil War may be attributable to Louis Godey’s wish as the publisher to exclude political debate for the sake of marketing to a wide audience. In her own writings, too, however, Hale herself altogether avoided the topic of slavery after 1854.9 Hale’s retreat from the debate over slavery marks a point of incongruence between abolitionism and female republicanism. More broadly, to the extent that they became differentiated, these two kinds of public practice for women—one dedicated to ending racial injustice and the other dedicated to preserving and gentrifying the nation—contradicted each other in ways that contributed to the shaping of later schisms in American literary culture. Both abolitionism and female republicanism were conceived as ideological curatives to ills of the republic, but by midcentury the form of women’s public culture that Hale’s work represented—the dominant one—had little oppositional force against the republic’s hypocrisies about race. Patricia Okker associates the weakening of the female print culture’s social impact in the years that followed the Civil War with Godey’s failure to encourage its female readers to support the war effort.10 Whether or not the magazine’s policies helped to cause this decline, for reasons external to but with impact upon female print culture, it occurred at roughly the same time that slavery ended. Amid the increasing masculinism of postbellum capitalism and specialist culture, sentiment lost ground as a way of practicing critical citizenship. When women’s public culture thrived, the permissions and proscriptions shaping different print venues provided contexts

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for mingling directness with indirection, and thus for the sophistication of both subjectivity and technique in women’s poetics. The postbellum market did not exclude women writers, but it did urge women’s poetics away from social engagement. The attrition of the politics of sentiment once slavery had ended weakened the rationale for associating poetic feeling with public discourse on social issues. Literary Slaves Among the many women writers whose careers Sarah Josepha Hale promoted, she gave none higher praise than Hannah Flagg Gould, even though Gould had frequently contributed to the radical abolitionist periodical the Liberator early in her career. Gould’s participation in the abolitionist movement may have been solely literary; she makes no appearances in biographies of William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the Liberator, nor in histories of women abolitionists, and the brief entries on her in standard biographical references do not mention antislavery activities. Few of her poems, even among those in the Liberator, directly address slavery; Garrison commonly printed lines of general inspiration amid polemical verse. Gould’s having shared with Garrison the hometown of Newburyport, Massachusetts, may have been her channel to the pages of the Liberator rather than any prominent presence in antislavery organizations. The single letter to Gould among John Greenleaf Whittier’s published correspondence solicits her poetry for a book to be published by the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia in 1839. She sent “The Dying Revolutionary Soldier.”11 Daughter and caretaker of a disabled veteran of the Revolution, Gould had roots in revolutionary-era republicanism. Whittier’s one mention of Gould, dated 1832, says: “Miss Gould of N.P. [Newburyport] is a good writer”—this in a letter to Hale, who was compiling Flora’s Interpreter, a much-reprinted giftbook.12 By 1854, when Hale published her encyclopedic Woman’s Record, she had chosen Gould as an exemplary poet, a practical and pious antidote to the “Byronian Era”: Passion has too often usurped the place of reason, and a selfish sensitiveness been fostered, instead of that healthful sentiment of complacency in the happiness of others, which all high exercise of the mental faculties should exalt and encourage. It is this enlarging and elevating the affections, which

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improves the heart and purifies the taste. And this is one important office of true poetry—such poetry as Miss Gould has written.13

Gould’s career thus crossed over between conflicting manifestations of women’s public culture. Judging from Hale’s delineations of what women should and should not do about public topics, tensions between abolitionism and conservative female republicanism formed around how the use of print media was conceived: whether as a supplementary form of public argumentation taking politics as a ground of moral contest, or as a means of disseminating an elevated social sensibility that, to preserve its feminized moral legitimacy, must avoid all divisive political debates. Gould’s poems “The Slave Mother’s Prayer” (1832) and “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” (1837), my focus in this section, address the tensions in women’s engagement in public media. In this chapter, to situate Gould’s “The Slave Mother’s Prayer” in abolitionist poetics, I first discuss other abolitionist poems with themes related to Gould’s: “The Kneeling Slave” (1830) by Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, a Quaker who pioneered the development of a special discourse for female antislavery; “An Appeal to Women” (1834) by Sarah Louisa Forten, a member of a prominent African American family of Philadelphia; and “The Slave Mother” (1854) by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, whose activism extended from 1850s abolitionism to turn-of-the-century racial uplift. Harper’s poem, the only one from the 1850s, reflects changes in both the public reception of women speakers and the rhetorical strategies of the antislavery movement. Frances Smith Foster situates Harper in the second generation of American women orators, who were able to take advantage of the partial public acceptance that the first generation, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had earned for women speakers.14 More sensational than the poems of the 1830s, Harper’s “Slave Mother” belongs to the phase of abolitionist discourse that developed in the 1840s as the movement sought a wider northern audience, more unreservedly exploiting sectional rivalry. Representations of the horrors perpetrated by southern culture, particularly abuses of women and disruptions of families, were overlaid on the earlier appeal to moral and religious principle, which had still sought to convert slaveowners as well as Northerners to the cause of abolitionism.15 A touchstone for comparing the poetics of American women’s abolition-

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ism with the poetics of late-Romantic elite literary culture is “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, first published in the Boston abolitionist giftbook The Liberty Bell in 1848. With this and other poems, Browning defied British as well as American proscriptions against women’s taking political positions and moved against the trend in nineteenth-century elite poetics toward segregating poetry from public issues. As part of American print culture, the poem’s impassioned argumentativeness, its denaturing of the mother-child bond, and its cry for slave insurrection align it against gentility; indeed white “church ladies” are one target of its scorn. Yet Browning also violates the veils of tact common in American abolitionist rhetoric. “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” takes up the enduring folk narrative of a sexually betrayed woman committing infanticide and emphasizes the differences that the scene of American slavery makes to this story. William Wordsworth’s version of the infanticidal mother’s story, “The Thorn” (1798), cites and embellishes British folk voices to tell of a woman driven mad by sexual betrayal. Browning’s poem begins with the word “I”—the mother tells her own story, dramatizing the deadly racial hypocrisies of republicanism and Christianity with her insistence,: “I am not mad: I am black” (l. 218). The woman’s “fall” in Browning’s poem occurs through rape rather than seduction, and the speaker names her rapist at first “white men” (l. 101), accusing a whole class rather than an individual. Her rationale for infanticide, too, highlights the racial aspect of her oppression: she kills the baby boy because he is white like her rapist-master. At 288 lines, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” is far longer than most American abolitionist poems; the sheer space devoted to it in The Liberty Bell would have paid tribute to the status of its author. Today, in part reflecting the greater legitimacy of Victorian poetry than nineteenthcentury American poetry in literary studies, no American abolitionist poem approaches Browning’s poem in degree of canonicity. The poetically brilliant voice carries a much-praised critique of oppression—superior, in Isobel Armstrong’s opinion, to that articulated in Aurora Leigh.16 Yet, in at least one key way, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” is out of touch with the legal discourse of racial identity. In having her speaker reason that a light-skinned child would perpetuate the raced division between oppressors and oppressed, Browning misses the fact that the light-skinned child

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of a white man and a slave woman would not be born “white” or free in the United States. If one moves this story, however, to the Caribbean plantation from which Barrett Browning’s family gained its wealth, the whiteness of the runaway slave’s child takes a different cast. In Dared and Done, Julia Markus describes the complex interrelations of extended, mixed-race Jamaican families, arguing that Browning knew she had African ancestry, most likely through her paternal grandmother. Children born slaves could join the oppressor class through the patronage of their illegitimate fathers, many of whom would educate their mixed-race children in England and use other means to remove them from raced oppression. Browning’s father tried to prevent all eleven of his children from marrying; Markus argues that his famous tyranny concerned his fear that dark children would be born and that, with the runaway slave’s horror of her white child, Browning inverts her father’s fear.17 But Browning would also have had reason to see a future patriarchal oppressor in the “white” child of a slave woman, a child in whom she compressed the generations that distanced her father from his slave ancestors. Barrett Browning’s dramatic monologue bears the same relation to the poetics of American women’s abolitionism that an ambitious work bears to a genre whose possibilities it seeks to exhaust: it covers the themes of the genre, at the same time making explicit themes that its precursors could not fully speak, replacing partial entries in a localized dialogue with a voice that resonates beyond the local. For Browning, here as elsewhere, this voice is a female variant on the Romantic heroic outcast; the slave woman’s last words before leaping from Plymouth Rock echo Percy Bysshe Shelley at his most spasmodic: I fall, I swoon! I look at the sky. The clouds are breaking in my brain; I am floated along, as if I should die Of liberty’s exquisite pain. (ll. 246–9)

As American abolitionists adopted sensational rhetorical strategies in the 1840s, such horrors as rape and infanticide became more explicit in their reports on slavery’s evils. But a voice of the power of Barrett Browning’s runaway slave would have been difficult to imagine from within a move-

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ment whose rhetorical strategies depended very largely on depicting Africans as naturally gentle and pious victims whose suffering must ultimately be redemptive. Browning’s speaker explicitly rejects the role of Christ figure: Our wounds are different. Your white men Are, after all, not gods indeed, Nor able to make Christs again Do good with bleeding. We who bleed (Stand off!) we help not in our loss! We are too heavy for our cross, And fall and crush you and your seed. (ll. 239–45)

That the phrase “we who bleed” can be and has been borrowed out of context to mean “we who menstruate” is an indication of how readily, despite its repeated references to “black” and “white,” this poem’s prophetic, damning voice loses its racial specificity and turns to an agony over gender oppression, much as Sojourner Truth’s apocryphal “Ain’t I a woman” is taken as an unraced claim on behalf of all women. Angela Leighton, discussing Browning’s superiority to her sentimental precursors, also tends to evade the poem’s racial content. “Black” and “white” for Leighton translate to a rigid moral structure that the poem undermines in its attack on male power.18 Of the abolitionist poems discussed in the following pages, Hannah Gould’s most resembles Browning’s. Gould also uses a first-person voice and stages a situation analogous to infanticide that raises broad religious and political questions related to gender. The greatest contrast, other than length, between Browning’s and Gould’s poems concerns their stance toward public exposure. Browning’s staging of the poem’s speech event is operatic: her speaker kneels in angry prayer at Plymouth Rock while slavehunters, her ultimate audience, draw near. As Dorothy Mermin points out, Browning confronts the difficulties surrounding self-exposure by assuming an aggressively hostile audience and condemning it for the violence done to her—to the poet as well as the slave.19 In “The Slave Mother’s Prayer,” Gould veils her speaker in privacy and piety; in her later “Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy,” discussed in chapter 4, she takes a self-conscious look at the anxieties that necessitate such veils, rendering them comical while at the same time exposing traces of the violence done through ex-

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posure and calling attention to the role racial difference played in the shaping of American women’s poetics. Supplication and Condescension: Voicing the Slave Mother The woman kneeling in defiance of nation, God, and her would-be captors in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” inverts an iconic image that had circulated for several decades among British and American abolitionists. William Lloyd Garrison began using the image of a supplicating black woman in 1832 as the emblem for the Liberator’s “Ladies’ Department.” The motto “Am I not a woman and a sister” curves above the image. By 1836 the kneeling, partly clothed figure was the unofficial logo of American women’s abolitionism, stitched in samplers and printed on stationery, besides appearing in publications (fig. 3). The first Antislavery Convention of American Women in 1837 adopted a resolution promoting the use of such visuals to speak affectively beyond language for the inarticulate: “so that the speechless agony of the fettered slave may unceasingly appeal to the heart of the patriot, the philanthropist, and the Christian.”20 The kneeling woman had first appeared in publications of the British abolitionist movement, preceded by a similar emblem showing a male slave, his torso exposed, pleading his manhood and brotherhood. Jean Fa-

3. Hard Times token (1838) based on the emblem of women’s abolitionism. Smithsonian Institution, National Numismatic Collection, Douglas Mudd. Reproduced in Yellin 4.

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gan Yellin points out that the two figures’ partial nudity exposes gender differences and thus implies political differences in their uses. The male slave has a powerful physical build that the female slave lacks; he may be capable of throwing off the yoke of slavery, but she must depend on outside agency for her liberation. Embodying vulnerability rather than strength, the female supplicant emphasizes the pacifism of the abolitionist movement—its disclaimer of intent to foment insurrection. Her vulnerability also, however, raises questions about sex. She is sexually ambiguous in ways specific to her gender: vulnerable to exploitation or indecently self-exposed, a potential victim or a seductress.21 Thus while the motto emphasizes commonality between black and white women, the image builds condescension into women’s antislavery activism. Abolitionist women are to be the actors in realizing human kinship, and their recognition of the slave woman’s oppression is to come through pity for a sexual condition degraded below their own conformity to patriarchal gender patterns. Soon after adopting the image of the kneeling female slave, abolitionist print culture redirected the image’s disruptive sexual energies toward sentiment by identifying the woman as a mother whose sacred bond with her children slavery could disrupt. This identification complemented a central tenet of female republicanism, that women’s political role was to form the children they raised in ways suited to citizenship in a modern Christian nation. To identify the abolitionist icon as a mother, however, opened still another uncertainty even as it focused anxieties about sexual vulnerability. Who was her children’s father? Was he her white master, or was he a slave with whom she could not have any legal bond? When told, the answers add to the story of this “woman and sister” miscegenation by rape, the most prominent theme of women’s abolitionist fiction, and the slave system’s disruption of black kinship ties. Left untold, these themes still surrounded her iconic figure with a highly charged ground. The contrast between free white women’s agency and enslaved black women’s victimhood that underwrote female abolitionism closely resembled the dialectical typologies of white and black womanhood that supported proslavery arguments. Both dualisms tended to disembody white women while embodying black women. Advocates of slavery idealized white womanhood by imagining it as emptied of attributes that could connect it with material reality; black womanhood, on the other hand, served as the repository for the carnality discarded in forming the icon of “pure

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womanhood.”22 Both Elizabeth Margaret Chandler and Sarah Louisa Forten shaped poems related to the emblem of female abolitionism around the antislavery version of this dialectic. Although differing in the ways that they situate race and slavery, both Chandler’s “Kneeling Slave” and Forten’s “Appeal to Women” speak directly to a white female audience, urging them to embrace their sisterhood to black women. Both poems were published in abolitionist periodicals, Chandler’s in the Genius of Universal Emancipation and Forten’s in the Liberator. Forten’s was also distributed and read aloud to attenders at the 1837 convention for antislavery women. While gender types were more extreme in the slaveholding states than in the free states, an ideal of disembodied, aristocratic femininity had gained strength in the northern middle class during the Jacksonian era in reaction against the uncultivated democratic “masses.” The setting for these poems’ circulation suggests that Chandler and Forten saw the need for northern women to resist aspects of the white feminine ideal, and that they were working toward the formation of a feminine type that would actively engage in reproducing politically effective public sentiment. Chandler names race in the first line of “The Kneeling Slave”—“Pity the negro, lady!”—but she frames the dialectic of white and black around leisure and labor rather than race. White womanhood exists in a protected familial space embedded in metaphors of “flowers” and “bowers” (ll. 7, 8), a garden from which black woman is cast out to do endless work, shed bitter tears, and become subject to a master’s will. It is as if Eve’s biography were divided between a white woman who retains Edenic innocence and a black woman who suffers the fall. Phrases such as “happy lot” and “frowning fate” (ll. 2, 9) imply that the contrasting conditions of white and black women are decreed. Yet, without directly demanding an end to slavery, Chandler’s poem moves against acquiescence to any “graduated scale” (l. 12) of life which might rationalize the slave woman’s exilic condition. From the first word, “Pity,” the poem uses the rhetoric of sentimental condescension. Midway through the poem, however, Chandler changes her address from “lady” to “woman” and reaches beyond sentiment to demand a recognition of kinship: “She is thy sister, woman!” (l. 17). Chandler’s use of “lady” in her poem’s opening indicates that she is speaking to women who pattern their gender role on the traditions of the feudal aristocracy. But with the change of address to “woman,” she challenges her reader to descend from a ranked to a generic category and raise her sister to

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an equal condition. Chandler’s closing lines ask the beneficiaries of the dialectic of leisure and labor to examine whether its “bliss” has not made them selfish: Wilt thou not weep to see her rank so low, And seek to raise her from her place of woe? Or has thy heart grown selfish in its bliss, That thou shouldst view unmoved a fate like this? (ll. 19–22)

White female prelapsarianism can impair the capacity to identify with another’s suffering; innocence itself is guilty of a spiritual failure. Using a critical measure drawn from religious sentimentality, Chandler identifies a flaw in its logic. While for Chandler to be “negro” is to be enslaved, Forten does not make that equation. “An Appeal to Women” pleads on behalf of a plural self, black women, rather than on behalf of an abject other. Like other abolitionist women, Forten had made her own copies of the kneeling slave woman, for example, by drawing the image in a friend’s album.23 In this poem, however, she revises the posture of supplication from one of helpless pleading to one of helpful preaching. Urging her audience to act heroically, Forten nevertheless omits reference to slavery and speaks to differences of skin color: Our ‘skins may differ,’ but from thee we claim A sister’s privilege, in a sister’s name. (ll. 7–8)

The phrase Forten quotes, “skins may differ,” is typical of the kinds of phrases that circulate widely in groups that value at least a nominal antiracism. The phrase is nearly always followed by a qualifier implying that differences in skin color do not matter—a gesture of erasing race. Forten’s quotation marks have the effect of ironizing the dismissal of racial difference, implying there is more to be said. Forten’s last stanza explores differences of skin color in relation to moral authority. The flowery metaphysics of white standards of beauty signify for Forten a superficial feature that time will easily destroy: Oh, woman!—though upon thy fairer brow The hues of roses and of lilies glow— These soon must wither in their kindred earth . . . (ll. 17–9)

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Though figured transcendently, the white ideal is not transcendent and cannot be sustained, therefore white women should store up moral “lustre” that will outlast their complexions (l. 22). Forten’s appeal figures a sisterhood across races that is not about white condescension toward black women but opens channels for black women to chasten white women with a racially distinctive moral authority. Forten’s critique of standards of beauty is not radical; she does not undo the equation of prettier with lighter that resonates in the word “fairer.” She does, however, imply that dark skin can exempt women from the ephemerality of the white ideal, a critical distinction whose sharpness some readers must have felt. As male carpe diem poetics teach, not just the grave but age too withers “the hues of roses and lilies”; if the white ideal is nothing more than physical beauty, it pertains only to youth. A third sense of “fairer,” however, connected with the democratic ideal of equality,24 emerges in the line that follows the three cited above: “From whence the fair and dark have equal birth” (l. 20). If “fairer” works as withdrawn flattery for white listeners, it also carries a tone of encouragement. The restoration of the natal equality of “fair and dark” calls on the fair to exert their virtues, to become “fairer.” Forten thus turns the objectifying conventions of the white female ideal toward a call for activism. Both “The Kneeling Slave” and “An Appeal to Women” illustrate the revisionary complication of the poetics of social categories induced by abolitionist rhetoric. A more vivid illustration of this revisionism is the rhetorical inversion of patriotic commemorations, as Eliza Follen and, later, Frederick Douglass did with the Fourth of July25 and as Barrett Browning does by locating her speaker at the site where the Pilgrims landed. Chandler and Forten manipulate sympathy and womanhood, key categories in female republicanism. Differing in their strategies, Chandler and Forten build their arguments on the politics of sympathy, neither of them taking for granted its spontaneous flow across races. Construing race as rank, Chandler takes feeling as only a first gesture in closing the distance between white women and slave women, the full gesture being recognition of a familial bond. Forten, too, claims family ties between races, but taking race as appearance, she calls out white women’s moral self-interest, drawing on the self-interestedness of the sentimental dynamic of transcendence through sympathy. Both Chandler and Forten also intervene in the dialectical construction of white and black womanhood. Chandler’s critique

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takes for granted the ground of the dialectic but points to self-centeredness as a flaw inherent to the formation of the white ideal’s “innocence” through class status. Forten, in contrast, shifts the ground of whiteness from the abstract to the physical: the white ideal is really about youthful beauty, and for white women to internalize it, by implication, is to acquiesce to their own objectification, not to transcend embodiment. Frances Harper’s and Hannah Gould’s poems differ from those of Chandler and Forten in that rather than pressing an argument, they dramatize events occurring within slavery. Harper’s “Slave Mother” is oratorical, spoken in a public voice that many readers would have heard as Harper’s own, the voice of a well-known abolitionist lecturer. While an earlier generation of women orators had helped to ease audiences’ doubts about the morality of women’s transgressing gender norms to enter public discourse, Harper’s race exposed her to controversies from which white lecturers were exempt. Foster speculates that Harper’s father may have been white; her light color was a matter of curiosity to her often segregated white audiences, who sometimes debated whether she was simply made up to appear black. At the same time, white abolitionists embraced this cultivated and eloquent speaker as evidence that African Americans should not be enslaved. In either case—whether as a woman of uncertain race or as a “colored woman of whom white women may be proud,” as Unitarian minister Phebe Hanaford wrote of her—Harper as a physical presence served to mediate between white audiences and enslaved black subjects. This is the role of the speaker in “The Slave Mother,” which also captures much of William Wells Brown’s characterization of Harper’s ethos at the podium: “Her arguments are forcible, her appeals pathetic, her logic fervent, her imagination fervid, and her delivery original and easy.”26 Rather than presenting a polemical argument, “The Slave Mother” asks the audience to transport their senses into slavery. It begins: “Heard you that shriek?” The poem explains how it can be that a mother’s son “is not hers” (ll. 17, 19, 21): in slavery, kinship is not belonging, and the child will be sold. Harper aims to transform the listening subject not only by arousing sympathy but also by striking terror. While Harper’s “Slave Mother” describes the severing of mother and child in the voice of an impassioned observer, Gould’s earlier “Slave Mother’s Prayer” is cast as a secret utterance, a private speech occasion similar to that of a dramatic monologue. The audience eavesdrops rather than

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being directly addressed. This difference corresponds to other differences critical to Harper’s and Gould’s envisioning of the social effects of their poems. The two poems imply different degrees of engagement with print and oral media. In print, Harper’s dramatization still works as a script for an oral presentation, occurring with speaker and audience in one another’s immediate sensory presence. Gould’s choice of a spiritual, inward speech aligns her poem more with textuality, produced and consumed in private spaces, than with oratory. The different ways in which Harper and Gould situate their audiences also correspond to differences in temporality. Harper spends three of her poem’s eleven stanzas on the past, characterizing the intimacy that had existed between mother and son, but the rest of the poem occurs in the present. The mother’s shrieks occur now; “they” are taking her child away at the moment that Harper speaks (l. 33). The audience members are to immerse themselves in the spectacle of slavery, to feel the shock of the slave system viscerally, to become witnesses themselves. Gould, too, briefly refers to the past relationship between the mother and her son, but their separation—through death rather than sale—is an event not yet under way, one she seeks to bring about. The one brief line of prayer in Harper’s poem— ”Oh, Father! must they part?” (l. 32)—leaves unresolved a confusion that often emerges in the language of Christian sentimentality between the earthly and the heavenly cast of characters: is the addressee God or the rapist-slavemaster-patriarch? But with God cast as the consistent internal audience for Gould’s speaker, the weight of her poem falls heavily on the spiritual future. Judgment will come, but Gould’s representation of the end time strangely lacks the socially transformative dimension that abolitionist millennialism imagined. In contrast to the Liberator’s masthead, which associates the end of slavery with the gathering up of all souls at the Christian end of time, Gould’s speaker envisions a single slaveholder standing before God. Comparison of Harper’s and Gould’s depictions of the slave woman also shifts the critical perspective on the dialectical construction of black and white women. Longer narrative poems by Harper show mothers in desperate action to save their children from slavery (in contrast to Barrett Browning’s mother, who acts to sever an unwanted tie with the “master” race). In “The Slave Mother, a Tale of Ohio,” Harper narrates the case of a woman who killed her infant when she believed they were about to be seized and

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returned to the South, the same case on which Toni Morrison based Beloved. In “Eliza Harris,” a poem she revised several times, Harper retold the story of the young mother in Uncle Tom’s Cabin who escapes across ice floes with her child. But the figure in Harper’s “Slave Mother” conforms to the “inarticulate sufferer” representation for whom the women’s convention of 1837 resolved to speak: limited to a primal “shriek” (l. 1), she sounds her pain without language. Gould’s “Slave Mother’s Prayer” does give the woman language. Praying at midnight, she is a soul momentarily free of embodiment in labor; moreover, Gould imagines her defying nature in her plea to God, transcending the impulses of materiality. The voice Gould gives to a slave speaker differs radically from the voice of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s runaway slave. Browning subsumes the dynamic interaction of opposites—embodiment and disembodiment, victimhood and agency, speechlessness and command of language—within the character of her speaker. Gould’s slave mother crosses over the boundary between black and white womanhood; she is given characteristics associated with idealized white womanhood and endowed with genteel poetic diction. Gould thus avoids representing the black woman in the terms prescribed by the white-black dialectic, but she does so by collapsing blackness into whiteness. In the second stanza Gould shows the poem’s subject moving into the slave mother’s position: How wretched must that mother be, (And I’m the hapless one,) . . . (ll. 13–4)

The first of these lines offers a hypothetical mother, in much the way that an argumentational poem like Chandler’s or Forten’s would have done to illustrate a point. In the second line, “I” parenthetically shifts into identity with the hypothetical mother, as if the speaker were explaining a disguise she is wearing. For the reader, this shift means following two fictive gestures—first imagining a wretched mother, then imagining that “I” is she. Gould does not simply try to move sympathetic identification; she models it, but she does so in a way that erases difference between the poem’s subject and the other it investigates—by ventriloquizing subjectivity. That Gould’s poetic “I” occupied a snowflake, wind, frost, and a wounded bird in other poems should alert us to her tactic, common in women’s sentimental poetics, of authorizing her voice by mediating it through the ani-

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mation of moral objects.27 In “The Slave Mother’s Prayer” she authorizes her speaking on slavery, in effect, by personifying a person. The future of slavery—its end—implicitly becomes the audience’s responsibility in Chandler’s, Forten’s, and Harper’s poems; using different strategies, all three work at transforming listeners into agents of change. Gould’s triangulation of an eavesdropping abolitionist audience with the slave mother and God, however, complicates the implication of where agency is to originate. Presenting a slave in prayer (as Gould does also in “The Black at Church”) sets an image of pious humility against proslavery representations of Africans as unregenerate heathens, thus lending Christian imagination to the task of persuading a white public that slaves are worthy of free citizenship. Her representation of the slave mother’s piety has strangely immobilizing consequences, however, for a reader encountering this poem in an activist-oriented context such as the Liberator. The first two lines double a concerned, insightful reader with the poem’s internal listener, God: O Thou, who hear’st the feeblest prayer, The humblest heart dost see . . . (ll. 1–2)

But the prayer goes on to make requests that a human audience cannot grant, asking not for activism or even for solidarity but for the death of her son and the eternal spiritual perpetuation of the master. The reader separates from God, left with nothing to do but ponder the extremity of the speaker’s state of mind. The imagined subjectivity of the supplicating icon, for Gould, results in an agency that is restricted to acts of petitioning a God who is asked to intervene on behalf of others—not herself. I do not mean to dismiss the poem’s appeal to spiritual agency; as Gould shows, that agency places formative burdens on the subject. The speaker’s requests, polarized against the natural, wound her subjectivity: nature may demand life for the child and death for her oppressor, But how, O God, does nature bleed Upon the boon I ask! (ll. 11–2)

Garrisonian theology held that slave owning was a sin; in the closing stanzas, the prayer emphatically makes this point to its second audience, the reader, casting the sin as a failure of feeling:

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If pardoning grace can be bestowed, And Heaven has pity then, For him, who here no pity showed Towards his fellow-men, Thou’lt spare him, in thy mercy, Lord, The sinner’s fearful doom— The wages, for his just reward, Of death beyond the tomb. (ll. 29–36)

To her first audience, God, Gould’s slave mother prays for subversion of a fundamental economy of the sacred, that sin earns the wage of death. “If pardoning grace can be bestowed” (l. 29)—the uncertainty underscores the seriousness of the sin—then it depends upon the slave mother’s ability to sway God’s judgment. This power is tremendous, Christlike. The poem’s concern with spiritual agency thus centralizes the formation of a subject whose source of agency and transcendence is self-denial. The implied temporal arrangement of the fulfillment of her requests shows the cost of this subject’s formation: between the present of her praying and the future of the Last Judgment, her son will die and be buried in the earth. The speaking is a moment of individuation, the prayed-for death of the infant a transformative mediating term. In contrast to the infanticide in Browning’s poem, through which she details how oppression pervades the mother-child bond, the child’s death in Gould’s poem transforms the speaker’s discourse from one about mothers and children to one about God and man. Browning’s mother anticipates meeting her son in death, where color will cease to differentiate them and the racial injury to their bond will be healed. Gould offers no clue of the possibility, cherished in millennial Christianity, of reunion beyond the grave—a meeting that, in abolitionist discourse as well as slave religion, could stand in for the hope of freedom. Omitting both herself and her son from the celestial future, the speaker casts heaven as an agonistic scene between God and the master, a “naked spirit,” the vulnerability of the emblematic supplicant having been transferred to him. By the end of the poem, the speaker’s condition of bondage has been left behind in favor of her performative engagement in the economy of redemption, cast as the prospect of Heaven’s acting on sentiment toward a man who has failed to do so toward other “men.” The state of mind that the reader is invited to contemplate in Gould’s

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poem, then, posits an extreme, even inverted ethical stance toward a bad world. While the prayer generates for the speaker the merits of transcendent endurance, it begs the destruction of the innocent and the sustenance of the oppressor, in effect the elimination of the human future and the removal of heavenly moral discipline. Presumably, the reader is to be moved to action by the spectacle of a mother pushed to such an extreme. Other abolitionist writers told stories of infanticide with similar aims, as Harper did in “The Slave Mother: A Tale of Ohio.” Gould not only avoids the full horror of the act by having her speaker ask God to carry out the infanticide; she gains for her speaker an unimpeachable piety. Her use of a betrayed mother’s infanticidal wishes also differs from the frame Wordsworth used for this theme in “The Thorn.” In his ballad, the madwoman may or may not have killed her child; their briefly sketched story serves as a vehicle for weaving a magical identity between irrational femininity and animistic nature, both beyond the reach of either law or redemption. Gould’s mother, however, is far from a mad reprobate; uttered in prayer, her infanticidal wish gains a Christian rationality. Even so, the speaker’s requests remain paradoxical when situated in abolitionism. In the context of debates over slavery, Gould is having her speaker pray for the endurance of white patriarchy. Even if slaveowners’ failure to “pity” is a sin, they should not fear, Gould implies, that abolitionism aims to annihilate them, physically or spiritually. A more subversive reading of the speaker’s plea on behalf of her master is worth entertaining, given that his redemption is contingent on an emphatic “if ” and that the speaker burdens the closing stanzas with a recitation of his crimes. In the hubris of humility, the speaker may be instructing God as to her master’s appropriate fate, hinting in reverse at her own wishes for his disposal. For Gould, these stanzas may represent an opportunity to pass angry judgment, as Barrett Browning does without the veils of meekness and piety. Yet such a reading does not account for Gould’s omitting any indication of an afterlife for the slave mother and her son. In the context of the real-world aims of abolitionism, Gould’s leaving the child under the earth with no life “beyond the tomb” represents a failure to imagine his living beyond emancipation to join the mixed-race citizenry of a renovated world. But is the poem only about the American institution of slavery? When the speaker’s chronological story—her life-time—is separated from the poem’s narrative elements, how she became enslaved and who the father of

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her son was stand out as omissions—temporal instances that the moment of lyric prayer resists. What Browning’s poem explicitly foregrounds, the conditions of a woman’s reproductivity in slavery, is entirely erased from Gould’s poem even as the speaker pleads on behalf of a man whom the reader knowledgeable about such conditions might well suspect of having raped her. Gould does not, as Harper does (and as Browning omits to do), mention that the child can be taken from his mother and sold. Instead she posits an interval of infant freedom, time spent as a “nursling at my breast,” between “his natal hour” and his feeling the “unfeeling power” of “the tyrant’s rod” (ll. 20–2)—his disciplinary induction into the patriarchal system. Finally, the poem says nothing about race. Although its title specifies the speaker’s condition of servitude and its appearance in the Liberator connects it to American slavery, its content is historically generic with nothing to attach it to a particular time or place. Patriarchal state power, the organization of power that republicanism sought to transform, competes with the discourse of slavery in the language of this poem. In the incomplete kinship configuration, the father’s place is filled by the paternal dyad “master” and “God,” partners in divineright absolutism. The mother-speaker may be gambling that God can be won away from this alliance to endorse a citizenship of fellow feeling. The poem’s republicanism further shows in its engagement with the seduction narrative, the United States’s first popular genre. The slave mother’s requests mirror conventions of this genre: the fallen woman’s illegitimate child often blessedly dies, escaping life as an outcast, and its mother’s saintly last thoughts are often of forgiveness for her seducer. Gould’s poem thus is an intervening instance between the discourse of seduction in the early republic, whose fictional white heroines suffer from the conflicting forces of communal control and individual desire,28 and the later convention of the tragic mulatta, who suffers sexually for the redemption of race relations.29 Yet Gould’s allegorization of the seduction narrative also undermines republicanism: her speaker prays for absolution for the tyrant, not his overthrow, and asks for the death of her son. Female republicanism, as American women thinkers developed it in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, hinged on women’s capacity to create a new kind of political subject through their training of children, a role expected ultimately to bring about the millennial transformation of the public sphere.30

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In seeking the death of her son, Gould’s speaker repudiates her prospects for exercising this agency. The breakdown occurs in the shift of the white republican “I” into the position of “wretched mother,” in the overlaying and competing of republican and abolitionist discourses. As I argued above, the speech event in Gould’s poem corresponds to print culture in a way that Chandler’s, Forten’s, and Harper’s direct addresses to an audience do not, because the language of Gould’s poem fictively originates in private. Gould did not conceal her identity from readers of the Liberator, as many writers of her era, men and women alike, did even in less inflammatory periodical venues. But insofar as she dilutes the challenge for women to engage social issues by limiting herself to the figure of a woman praying alone in the dark of night, Gould accepts a restrained position that Sarah Josepha Hale would endorse: a woman’s public language is deferred and distanced, interiority replaces declamation. Gould does assign an enormous spiritual responsibility to her sequestered, female subjectivity—to compensate for the male public sphere’s refusal to make feeling its ground of action—but she does so by subordinating the welfare of women and children to a teleological struggle between God and man. There is, moreover, something fearfully alienating about the symbolic order Gould imagines when she has her speaker wish children would die rather than leave their mothers’ bodies to be inducted by the rod of phallic power. In contradiction to republican motherhood’s aim of laying groundwork for the transformation of the political sphere, the mother-child dyad remains radically unintegrated with the symbolic order. The future of human citizenship remains unimaginable. “The Slave Mother’s Prayer” precisely fits Toni Morrison’s observation about the “fabrication of an Africanist persona,” that it “is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity.”31 In the Africanist symbol, Morrison continues, a suppressed and repressed darkness is objectified as a persona responsible for exorcism, reification, and mirroring.32 When read for how Gould uses the Africanist persona to mirror writerly concerns, “The Slave Mother’s Prayer” becomes a sophisticated puzzle about modernity. A modern, literary voice assumes the identity of a woman subject to the enduring vestiges of feudal patriarchy. The patriarch is doubly present in the slaveowner and God, but the alliance between

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church and state has broken down; the speaker relies on the nonalliance between the owner of her body and labor and a heavenly father whom one addresses privately, not through an institution. While this intimate relationship with the Protestant God, like print culture, cultivates inwardness, God falls short as an ally against the residual feudal system, and an emancipated future remains unimaginable. The speaker gives away her dependency on the economic boss by pleading to God to preserve him even as she barely conceals a desire to immolate him. As an imaginary construction of the circumstances of culture-making, “The Slave Mother’s Prayer” posits the difficulty of freeing private poetic utterance from an oppressive organization of power. The culture-maker both furiously loathes the aristocratic patron and fears that the patron cannot be done without. Kerber notes that women’s public culture enabled women to approach full participation in civic culture while containing expectations of influencing the political system.33 An effect in Gould’s poem and elsewhere in antislavery discourse is that freedom must come through death, since it is bodies (with their markers of race and gender) that betray subjects to disempowerment.34 Translated to a writer’s concerns within modernity, the power to participate in culture but not in politics contributes to poetry’s withdrawal from aspiring to effect social change while lending a posthumous tone to the voice of poetic autonomy. Two linked strategies, directed toward the immediate transformation of the audience’s subjectivity, stand out in the abolitionist poems: they intervene in the construction of white women as disembodied figures and black women as embodied figures, and they work to arouse sympathy with enslaved black women. The dialectic of disembodiment and embodiment can be translated into one of protected leisure and unprotected labor and thus of social rank (Chandler); or it can be inverted so that the white ideal is materialized as a standard of physical beauty—an ephemeral value toward which black women may have a uniquely critical stance (Forten). Sympathy is both a principle and an affective state; it may be subjected to critical chastening or be roused through pathetic representations. Whether commanding sisterhood across races (Chandler and Forten) or confronting the audience with disrupted families (Harper and Gould), the language of sympathy invokes kinship. Gould’s poem diverges from the others in that rather than aiming for immediate transformation of the audience, an activist gesture that should

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produce more activists, it enacts sympathy as a literary device, a way of talking through an other, and makes the reproduction of historical agency secondary to the contemplation of spiritual agency in the face of ethical extremes. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem construes its social role through a paradox that Victorian poetry inherited from Romanticism along with elite art’s increasing dependency on the public marketplace: the poetic voice may be prophetic and revolutionary, but the audience proves to be anachronistic (like the Pilgrims), indifferent (like God), or hostile (like the slave catchers). A poem’s frustrated political power, in these circumstances, may emerge sublimated as forcefully brilliant language, thus contributing to poetry’s autonomy as a field of skill. The persona of a strong black woman driven by oppositionality serves Browning well as a vehicle for this paradox. For the anti-Byronic Gould who took part in a democratic print culture’s early stages of fragmentation, there could be no question of turning the poetic subject against her audience; instead, she models an ideally self-abnegating subjectivity. A comparison between “The Slave Mother’s Prayer” and “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” can stretch our understanding of the stress point in antebellum American women’s culture that Gould represents. Abolitionism called on women’s cross-racial sympathy through a language of kinship; yet slavery complicated actual kinship relations in ways that confused sentiment and undermined its effectiveness in producing knowledge of others and extending relational bonds. In “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy,” an exhibited corpse serves as a vessel for carrying anxieties about cultural coherence and kinship relations into the deep, indefinite past. The sacredness of the female public sphere depends on its masking itself in remoteness from the open arena of public discourse; even so masked, female culture risks being indecipherable and morally suspect to the community to which it is publicly displayed. The social category of race, charged with uncertainties about human relatedness, works at the edges of this stress point, containing and deferring uncertainties about female print culture’s effectiveness in building communities and shaping a common American culture.

4 The Mummy Returns Humor, Kinship, and the Bindings of Print

I n k e e p i n g with the conventions of modesty toward print, Hannah Flagg Gould did not initiate the publication of her first book, Poems (1832).1 Her friends collected verse that had appeared mostly in local periodicals, including four antislavery poems, and presented her with the finished volume. The book was successful enough to merit reprints in 1833 and 1835, and the 1836 edition incorporated a second volume along with the original collection of verse. “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” appears among the newly added poems, one of several humorous breaks in a series of moralizations more consistently formulaic and less politically edged than the fugitive verse of the first volume. The poem refers to a naturally mummified body, found in Kentucky’s limestone cavern system around 1816, that the American Antiquarian Society in Massachusetts placed on display. The first volume of Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society (1820) seems a very likely source for Gould’s poem: it includes several descriptions of mummies together with accounts of their discovery, catalogs of the items found with them, and speculations about their significance. The volume as a whole is preoccupied with describing and classifying the indigenous people of the Americas and reconstructing their past. For example, a series of short articles on Ohio’s “Ancient Race of People” puts a vanished culture and its history together piece by piece by querying and speculating about its material remnants: At what period did the Ancient Race of People arrive in Ohio? How long did they reside here? What was their number? The state of the Arts among them Urns discovered at Chillicothe

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Dress of the Mummies Description and figure of several Ornaments and Domestick Utensils Their Scientifick Acquirements Their Idolatry Religious Rites and Places of Worship What finally became of this People2

The volume also includes a series of letters about mummies discovered in Kentucky. In one of these letters, Dr. Samuel Mitchill closely describes the fur, cloth, and feathers in which the mummy is wrapped, comparing them to materials found elsewhere and naming the experts who could identify the plants and animals that were their source. The mummy serves the American Antiquarian Society as an instance for working out the science of racial modernity. The volume’s broader agenda—race and time— emerges as Mitchill analyzes the materials: “It may now be expected that I should offer some opinion, as to the antiquity and race of this singular exsiccation.”3 Mitchill at first rejects the idea that the mummy belonged to the same race as “the tribes of aborigines, now or lately inhabiting Kentucky,” because the material culture found with the mummies resembled objects found in Australasia rather than those made and used by contemporary tribes. In a later letter, Mitchill reveals his new conviction that the present-day “red man” and the “Malay”—the Australasian—are the same race.4 He is thus able to propose that there are only three races of men— the three that Gould names at the close of “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy.” In Gould’s poem, a precocious child speaker poses its own questions about the mummy, trying to understand its life in familiar terms. Did it have a family? Who disciplined it? Who loved it? And who had the eye that was pleased with the sight Of this form (whose queer face might be brown, red, or white,) . . . (ll. 23, 24)

This cryptic parenthetical phrase from the last stanza is Gould’s only reference to race in her second volume of poems. Antislavery references are conspicuously absent from this volume; “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” thus marks the place that advocacy for racial others occupied in Gould’s first volume. The mummy poem brings to light concerns about

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cultural production and social linkage that remain veiled in Gould’s antislavery verse. Taking place at a public exhibition, a setting opposite to the midnight solitude in which the slave mother prays, “The Child’s Address” raises questions about difference and kinship, the kinds of questions that Gould elides in her slave mother’s voice and story. Close reading of “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” points to a change in Gould’s perspective on her own cultural production. She had become aware of being on display, like the mummy, to an audience beyond her own local community—to strangers in strange places. Adopting the persona of a child boldly trying to initiate a public discussion, she looks back at an estranged version of herself—a woman buried with a musical instrument, an oral performer from an alien culture—and exposes the incoherence of her relationship with her audience. The child persona would not have originated in a childhood memory of the exhibition; Gould was in her twenties when the mummy was first exhibited. Rather, the mummy itself may have suggested a divided identity. A figure over six feet tall folded into fetal position, the mummy would have conveyed to viewers both largeness and smallness, the forms of adult and child bound together in death’s imitation of birth. If the child and the mummy in Gould’s poem are alter-selves, however, the Antiquarian Society’s display places them far apart. A child-self might look to an adult-self as the figure of her own future, but this adult’s story and its meanings lie buried in an indeterminate cultural past. To say that a corpse’s race is unidentifiable, as Gould does in the closing stanza, invokes the topos of death’s leveling differences, of the particulars of physical appearance being erased with bodily decay. But, like Sarah Louisa Forten in “An Appeal to Women,” Gould gives this convention an ironic frame. Coming amid the child’s apparent denials that the mummy is dead, in a setting concerned with traces of ethnic difference found in the American landscape, the child’s speculations about the mummy’s “queer face” evoke race as a category of the unknown rather than dismissing racial difference as irrelevant. With Gould’s shift in awareness about her exposure, the role of race in her work shifts, too. In “The Slave Mother’s Prayer,” race was an erased part of the reason for writing abolitionist poetry—to oppose social injustice. In “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy,” race becomes an unstable signifier of the many-layered otherness surrounding public exhibition—the sense of alienness that fills the gap in the audience’s knowledge of the body on display.

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The Vanishing Culture-Maker A poem about a mummy from the Kentucky caves is not overtly about slavery or white-black relations, but the parenthetical aside in the next-tolast line of “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” generalizes the question of race—the mummy could have been “brown, red, or white.” The mummified bodies found with artifacts in the Mammoth cave system in the early 1800s were actually Native American, estimated to have been there for several hundred years.5 Insofar as “The Child’s Address” concerns a Euro-American perspective on aboriginal racial others, it is a frontier poem domesticated by antiquarianism, a first encounter moved to a display cabinet. It plays on the cult of the vanishing American, a discourse that declared the disappearance of Native Americans to be both natural and already accomplished, whose decade of prominence in American literature just followed the date of the Antiquarian Society’s first publication and preceded and overlapped with radical abolitionism (1824–1834). This myth, a contribution to the naturalized race discourse that supported racial modernity, served two pressures that followed the conclusion of the War of 1812. Their sense of independence from European roots enhanced, United States cultural workers placed indigenous Americans at the center of a uniquely American heritage. At the same time, white injustice and violence against these cultural forebears needed to be covered up for the sake of justifying white expansionism. Lora Romero’s description of manifestations of the cult of the vanishing American in the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper captures a temporal gap that Gould also places between speaker and other in “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy.” Just as Cooper depicts “the racial other as an earlier and now irretrievably lost version of the self,” so does Gould, together with the antiquarians, conflate “racial difference and temporal distance on the evolutionary continuum of human history.”6 Gould’s humorous appropriation of the myth of the vanishing American for a meeting between alter-selves takes a grotesque, critical turn. Even dead, the early American has returned to sight; she is ensconced in the present, and someone has to elicit her self-accounting. The scene has a mixed tone; the child at once invites the mummy to tell an interested audience about herself and calls upon her to prove to skeptics that she is worth knowing about:

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And now, Mistress Mummy, since thus you’ve been found By the world, that has long done without you, In your snug little hiding-place far under ground— Be pleased to speak out, as we gather around, And let us hear something about you! (ll. 1–5)

The child, whose gender Gould does not identify, speaks only in first person plural, never singular. As the representative of the group viewing the mummy, the child tries to coax the mummy into public speech. Through her silence, this uncanny other seems to deny the categories by which her young interlocutor structures human experience. The problem of the poem—setting aside that a dead woman cannot answer the child’s questions—is the difference between the speaker’s present and the mummy’s past. The gap between the constructions the child makes and the actual story of the mummy’s life thus gives the poem its ironic tension. We can extrapolate from the poem that a woman died and was left in a cavern, wrapped in hemp and willow clothing, with a musical instrument and some ornaments beside her. An indeterminate time later, her corpse, mummified by the minerals in the cavern, was found and placed on exhibit. A child visiting the exhibit with a group of people reveals what is known and unknown about the mummy but leaves out mediating information. Missing from the poem is any inquiry about the process of preservation, which intrigued the antiquarians who wrote about the mummy because, unlike the mummification practices of ancient Egypt, it was natural rather than cultural. Also missing are speculations about the mummy’s long journey from Kentucky to the American Antiquarian Society, from the western frontier to the taxonomizing North. The child’s questions and speculations thus elide both the distant past when the mummy lived and the intermediary time elapsed between the body’s discovery and its exhibition. The mummy exhibit becomes an occasion for display of the child’s epistemological processes and the limitations of efforts to learn about difference based on what one already knows. The child’s attitude toward the mummy shifts between identification and estrangement. In the second stanza, the child concludes that the mummy had parents, but then, in words like a judge’s or lawyer’s, registers distrust because the mummy has failed to provide evidence that she had other relatives:

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No more of your line have we power to conceive, As you furnish us nothing by which to believe You had husband, child, sister, or brother. (ll. 8–10)

In the third stanza the child takes features of the body as evidence that the mummy took nourishment to live—a line of thinking that leads the child to death-grin humor: We know you have lived, though we cannot tell when, And that too by eating and drinking, To judge by your teeth, and the lips you had then; And we see you are one of the children of men, Though long from their looks you’ve been shrinking. (ll. 11–5)

Time, the difference between now and “then,” has consumed the mummy’s lips as well as her ability to confirm or deny any part of the child’s catalog of possible acts or suggested identities. The fourth stanza pityingly imagines the mummy as the victim of cruel treatment, perhaps punishment: Who was it that made you a cavern so deep, Refused your poor head a last pillow, And bade you sit still when you’d sunken to sleep, And they’d bound you and muffled you up in a heap Of clothes made of hempen and willow? (ll. 16–20)

The mummy most resembles an Anglo-American child here, when the speaker transports the disciplinary words “sit still”—words that a child might often have heard—to the mummy’s fixity in death. Difference, however, returns in the specific materials of the mummy’s clothing, and the last stanza raises difference to strangeness and sexualized artificiality. Othering is most prominent in the lines where race arises as a piece of the unknown. The poem’s last line shifts the burden of figuring the mummy’s life to a misapprehended artifact: And who had the eye that was pleased with the sight Of this form (whose queer face might be brown, red, or white,) Trick’d out in the jewels kept by you? (ll. 23–5)

“Jewels” very likely refers to ornamental objects that the mummy’s mourners left with her as part of a burial rite. That possibility is lost on the child

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speaker, who in the end can only slot the mummy as something “tricked out,” exotically costumed, comically fallen. The child’s ambivalence toward the mummy suggests an equally complex pattern of self-concealment and self-exposure on the part of the poet. A figure whose situation is analogous to Gould’s emerges from the details of the child’s interrogation. The second stanza worries over a gap that opens in the pun on mummy: a female body that is not a mother. Gould’s having been unmarried and childless could have opened just such a gap in her perspective on a women’s public culture built on the maternal role of reproducing citizens. The “line” or descendants of a woman who had neither husband nor child is beyond the “power to conceive” (l. 8). The third stanza acknowledges the mummy’s orality and recognizes her as one of the “children of men” (l. 14), marking a regression that, in stanza four, makes her resemble a punished child. It is not merely that her orality is silenced, however; she is “bound” and “muffled” in materials that could make a book (l. 19). The disciplinary constraints that attract the child’s sympathy figure the packaging of an oral culture-maker in textual trappings. If print culture conceals, it also exposes, and the final stanza envisions the culture-maker as someone who had an audience. The child first presents the mummy as an oral performer (now silenced): Say, whose was the ear that could hear with delight The musical trinket found nigh you? (ll. 21–2) The oral dimension of her making quickly changes to visual: “And who had the eye that was pleased with the sight / Of this form . . . ?” (ll. 22–3). The culture-maker here becomes identified with this form, the printed poem itself, embellished with the “jewels” of poetic artifice (l. 25). The suspicion of sexual inappropriateness raised in the last stanza corresponds to the social suspicion that haunted public women throughout the century, placing formative pressures on women’s poetics. The mummy’s bindings allow Gould to register a complaint about the strictures of print culture and the audience’s failure to understand the female culture-maker.

Indelicate Wit The vivid critical humor that the mummy figure brings to Gould’s complaint raises the question of how we are to perceive irony in Gould’s poem. What judgment of the child speaker, the naive reader of the mummy-as-

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text, does Gould imply? The Victorian genre of the dramatic monologue, with its conscious craft inducing the reader to judge the speaking subject, only began to appear in the 1830s, and Gould probably would not have seen the earliest examples.7 Nancy A. Walker’s work on gender and humor in nineteenth-century American culture does not tell us how to read Gould’s intentions, but it does caution that the critical edge of women’s humor is easily underread. The male humorist’s stance was one of aggressive independence; he was to confront and subvert dominant social forces, engaging the audience through the free play of intellect and an inside knowledge of society’s workings. Such a stance was inappropriate for women; feminine withdrawal from self-display mitigated against women’s writing humor as men did.8 Gould’s use of an ungendered naive voice allows her to evade the contradiction between femininity and humor, while also obscuring the identification between poet and mummy. The child’s voice situates the mummy’s life at a vague remoteness, as objects that are not a part of immediate experience might appear to a child. Gould’s vulnerability to being seen as deviating from gender norms is one of the very few concrete biographical details offered in The Dictionary of American Biography. A six-foot mummy might have struck Gould as a parodic double: “In person she was tall and of somewhat masculine proportions and features. She never married.”9 In Woman’s Record, Hale goes out of her way to insist that there was nothing masculine about Gould’s unusual gift for humor: “Wit is a much rarer quality than wisdom in female writers. . . . Miss Gould’s sprightly wit has the advantage of appearing quite original. She, however, uses it with great delicacy, and always to teach or enforce some lesson.”10 Rufus Griswold in The Female Poets of America (1849) also makes a point of feminizing Gould’s wit: “Often by a dainty touch, or lively prelude, the gentle raillery of her sex most charmingly reveals itself.”11 As Walker points out, it is easy to miss the satirical force of humor subdued by the requirements of femininity. Yet, if the naive speaker in “The Child’s Address” is a target of comic irony, Gould does not seem to want the reader simply to judge the child ridiculous. On the figurative level, the child’s efforts to learn do more than expose a failure to understand the woman performer; they open to scrutiny the representational apparatus surrounding the mummy’s objecthood. The poem travesties the exoticizing perspective that draws a fundamental distinction between a Western subject and a subjugated and silenced other,

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just as, in “The Slave Mother’s Prayer,” Gould rejects the conventional representation of slaves as “speechless.” Though the mummy is as muffled as she can be, the child seems to expect a response, naively unaware that the other is silenced. The child may be voicing the wisdom of the biblical “mouths of babes,” speaking the astonishment of everyone who sees this unrepresentable object, asking questions that the antiquarians who placed her on display have failed to explore. The letter about this mummy published in Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society details her appearance and dwells on the perfection of her preservation— although the body had so thoroughly dried that it weighed only twelve to fourteen pounds. The mummy’s shrinkage is symptomatic of her collectors’ having reduced rather than expanded knowledge. We have the body and the objects, even the speculations about her race, but we do not know what she has to do with us. How is she like and unlike us? What does she have to do with human connections, families, social linkages? When read in this way, the poem laughs at the epistemological practices of antiquarianism and challenges the culture industry to do better at articulating the subjectivity whose traces emerge from the American landscape. At the same time, the child’s uninhibited directness has a subversive, secularizing strain that works against the poetics of religious sentimentality, anticipating the kinds of options that women’s poetics would entertain with the waning of antebellum women’s print culture. Akin to the child who sees that the emperor is naked, this child sees that the mummy is clothed—“By the style of your dress you are not Madame Eve” (l. 6)—evidence of a human past different from the scriptural one. The mummy’s time is not a non-time, a space of bliss. The sight is potentially secularizing in that differing accounts of origins may relativize one’s sense of truth, but also in that we may be like this other, outside the history of salvation. To meet with this other is to look at the grin of death. The speaker repels identification with the mummy by exoticizing and sexualizing her in the last stanza. While this gesture may divert readers from Gould’s identification with the mummy, it also sets up a modernizing course in her poetics. Sympathy is withdrawn from the exercise of knowing the other. Thus the movement from the fourth stanza, in which the speaker pities the mummy for having been disciplined and abandoned, to the last stanza marks an opening gesture in separating moral sentiment from the quest for knowledge.

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The poem’s tone does not clearly sustain the child persona throughout; at moments, the cleverness of the language overshadows the naif, especially in the middle stanza’s pun on shrinking. The pun invokes the grotesqueness of corporeal decay while ascribing reclusive shyness to the mummy; the meaning one chooses turns on whether one takes the mummy to be living, as the child seems to do, or dead. Again: We know you have lived, though we cannot tell when, And that too by eating and drinking, To judge by your teeth, and the lips you had then; And we see you are one of the children of men, Though long from their looks you’ve been shrinking. (ll. 11–5)

On the figural level, the intelligence behind the child’s words—the adult poet who knows perfectly well the mummy is a corpse—makes earlier human culture the butt of jokes rather than the source of a productive line of inquiry. This approach to a representative of the past does more than help to conceal the analogy between mummy and poet; it works destructively on the figural link between them. For reasons ungiven in the poem, there is great anxiety about the earlier culture, just as the myth of the vanishing American served cultural drives both to appropriate and to destroy. Staging a struggle for continuity between living and dead people, a gesture that can be an act of sacred ritual, “The Child’s Address” implies that the effort is hopeless, the past does not bear looking into, and the future will hold no memory of it. The poem is further secularizing in its emphasis on cultural difference obliterated by ignorance: objects that could once have been sacred, the musical instrument and the jewels, become trivialized when their meanings are lost. Insofar as the poem concerns the poetic self ’s epistemologic struggles, the anxiety in it is about self and the social present, with the mummy serving as a medium for transferring worries about the present to the past. The pun in the third stanza holds the problem of mortality—“will I be dead some day too?”—just under the surface, while overall the child’s interrogation poses a different question for the living: Does our own culture make any sense? Contained in the child’s abundant production of speculations is an anxiety about how one makes sense of human culture—an anxiety inflected, the last lines suggest, through racial heterogeneity. A corpse found in Kentucky might indeed be brown, red, or white—African, indigenous

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American, or Euro-American; knowing which might help to decipher other details of its life, or, conversely, having access to such details might help to clarify its race. As things stand, no meanings can be affixed. The folk roots to which a young popular print culture would turn in seeking national distinctiveness are equally indeterminate: the precursor culture, too, could be brown, red, white, or all three. In this respect, it is the ethnicity of the pre-print culture whose materials feed text-making that is in question in the poem’s final lines. The public display that women writers risked resembles the condition of the Kentucky mummy. The mummy risks less than a living female author: by performing extreme self-restraint despite her exposure to a curious and irreverent audience, she is a precursor to the “veiled ladies” Richard Brodhead writes about, female performers of the 1850s who modeled privacy on the public stage.12 The child speaker, too, is on display—voluntarily, having stepped forward like a good republican citizen to speak on behalf of the group. Child and mummy thus stand for two sides of the public self, the genderless one is all speaking subject and the female other all spectacular object. If the child is an exemplary republican naif participating in oratorical culture, the mummy, although bearing traces of a past when she interacted as an oral performer with an audience that enjoyed her, becomes identified with the poem’s own veiled form. Both the mummy and the print cultural artifact are objects whose wrappings conceal amid display. To the uninhibited child-self, the adult woman is incomprehensible; her private shrinking from the looks of the “children of men” makes experiencing kinship with her as difficult as knowing about her kinship relations. Extended to women’s public culture, the child’s confusion about the mummy points out the incoherence of women’s obligation to be both retiring objects and subjects contributing their voices to the public sphere. “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” stages an instance of cultural making when a premodern female culture emerges into the oratorical sphere of a young republic. Gould satirizes this encounter, exposing a skeptical view of female public discourse. Like an abolitionist, the speaker in “The Child’s Address” speaks about and on behalf of a silenced other, and sympathetic identification has the effect—comical in this poem—of displacing the other with self. Gould’s satire fights against the loss of meaning that occurs as women’s culture is mediated to the public sphere through print. But the poem’s ambivalence about identification between

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child and mummy, and between poet and a female cultural producer whose race is uncertain, reveals that literary whiteness is at stake. In the American racial landscape, to identify women’s culture as a workshop for transforming local, oral culture into text is to place white female cultural workers in a racially ambiguous terrain. They can either challenge “literary whiteness” or reinforce it by situating the racial other firmly in the preliterate. The mummy also anticipates the retreat from public history of a poetry textualized on the bodies of dead women. There are many ways of reading these Poe-esque fetishized bodies, but Gould’s poem captures a central one: the loss of a supposed premodern fullness. For Gould, this loss generates not grief but nonsense, not aestheticism but children’s poetry. As history, culture, and kinship disappear from the story of the other, they are replaced by the play of a child’s imagination; childhood becomes a repository for sacred cultural materials that have been rejected or emptied of public meaning—materials that the nineteenth century will valorize as “nonsense” and the twentieth century will corral as evidence of the unconscious. Available Others Both “The Slave Mother’s Prayer” and “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” allow Gould to intervene, although in very different ways, in the dualism of transcendence and embodiment at work in the racial construction of womanhood. While the praying subject collapses the differences, exercising transcendence of her embodiment, the child speaker travesties the dualism, working its subjectivity out on the mummy’s grotesquely material body. In her dramatization of a woman’s intercession in sacred affairs, Gould masks the racial difference between herself and the slave through whom she speaks. In the child’s confrontation with the mummy, she masks the analogy between herself and a “discovered” singer of unspecified race who has no visible “line.” At the same time, she situates the mere possibility of the other’s racial alterity outside sacred history, in a meeting between a secular, quasi-scientific present and a vaguely situated, distant material past. Moving in opposite temporal directions, Gould’s two poems indicate a temporal separation between the concepts of slavery and race. “The Slave Mother’s Prayer” strives toward a sacred future, while “The Child’s Address” takes a backward look: race emerges as a confusing relic of humanity’s past. Gould thus links antislavery sentiment to a future imag-

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ined in celestial terms and racial heterogeneity to a past unimaginable in terms of human culture. For such a temporal arrangement, what becomes of “race” apart from slavery—whether in the discursive present, separate from antislavery pleadings, or in the envisioned future once sacred history fulfills slavery’s end? “Race” emerges as a crisis in antislavery discourse, something other than sacred, inadequately theorized in the terms that drove the movement. Like the slave mother, the mummy collects an aura of sexual fallenness, but she is a gaudily “trick’d out” corpse rather than a redemptive sufferer. While the slave mother poem calls for sympathetic identification with a sufferer and hence insists on the ethical unity of people, the mummy poem stages a failure to forge a sympathetic link when basic information is missing about the other. People are too different, too distant, the mummy poem suggests, for sympathy to produce new knowledge. The mummy’s emergence from hiding is an unexpected birth into the social world, in contrast to the slave child’s wished-for burial before he can be violently inducted into the social world. Similarly, information suppressed in Gould’s presentation of the slave mother returns in the form of the child’s notknowing about the mummy. Whose child were you? Who treated you so badly? Who appreciated you? If applied to the institution of slavery, the child’s questions about the mummy go to scandals of kinship—forced miscegenation and the “kinlessness” (as Hortense Spillers puts it) that the slave system imposed on African Americans.13 As I argued in my discussion of “The Slave Mother’s Prayer,” white women’s republican mission, projected into a slave mother, carries with it the mission of perpetrating and redeeming patriarchy and results in the unrepresentability of a real-world, raced future society. The mummy poem suggests that this unrepresentability comes about because the other’s patterns of culture, particularly kinship, cannot be traced or understood. The slaveholding white patriarch—the figure whom the slave mother prays to redeem—is largely responsible for the untraceability of kinship. Insofar as her prayer echoes female republicanism, and as long as male republicanism permits slavery to exist, this gap in knowledge of the other protects the legitimacy of her obligation to support the white male public sphere. Abolitionism’s failure to be antiracist, then, is imbricated with confusion and anxiety about kinship structures, confusion that also concerns what to feel about whom under what circumstances. This confusion would have had

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special nuances for women seeking to mobilize ideological constructions of femininity for political roles. If sisterhood and motherhood—female kinship roles—are the models of female political subjectivity, where is one left if (like the child interrogating the mummy) one recoils, confused about kinship structures, from an uncertainly raced victim of abuse? From my readings of the abolitionist poems in chapter 3, I gleaned two differentiations that are key in tracing the stresses between abolitionist activism and genteel republican female culture: Whether public discourse is associated with oratorical ethos (gendered male in republican traditions but opened to women in abolitionism) or whether public discourse is rendered proper by deferring presence, by using the medium of print to privatize public discourse; Whether moral and religious imperatives are followed even into embroilment in national political conflicts or whether moral and religious action is limited to conciliatory positions in national controversies.

Praying in private while the audience looks on from outside the scene, the slave mother mimics the conditions of print culture; the disappearance of the social future from her version of antislavery discourse then signifies a crisis in the efforts of antebellum print culture to replicate a face-to-face public sphere. The individual psyche is representable, heaven is imaginable, but the social collective lies beyond the imagination’s reach. If the slave mother is a reverential trope for female print culture, the mummy is a profane one that exposes this crisis from the reverse side. The community does appear in “The Child’s Address,” with the child as its representative orator. Wrenched from seclusion, the mummy or textualized body faces interrogators to whom she cannot respond, an audience accustomed to public discourse and baffled by her unforthcoming presence. In the persona of the speaking child, Gould the humorist of uncertain gender casts doubt on the efficacy of female print culture even as she takes part in it, wondering how one is to extract a message, a culture, a social self from such limited and isolated traces. In each poem, race appears or disappears at the edges of the speaker’s authority, at the border between knowing and not knowing. As the basis for the institution of slavery and the discourse opposing it, the category “race” provides the occasion in the slave mother poem for the reverential figure of female culture to reach for her sacred role, but race is absent from her lan-

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guage, and the figures raced black in the real slave system—herself and her son—vanish from both the earthly and heavenly futures, as if to empty the poem of the figural activity of race. In the mummy poem, race appears near the end of a chain of figural play, the next-to-last speculative gesture in the desecration of a figure of female culture. Race and being “trick’d out”—costumed, deceptive, seductive—mark the limits of the speaker’s repertory of categories for knowing the other. Race and sexualized trickery, the makings of the Jezebel stereotype, arise together in connection with the need for an audience. The child may be asking how the audience can know the race and the real moral nature of someone who comes to us only in print. But the convergence of race and sex here also marks a point where female culture turns from sacred to profane as it violates the difference between private and public. In this way the child’s uncertainty about the mummy’s race serves as a trope for uncertainties about print that are rooted in the American racial landscape: uncertainties about whether too much information that matters to the ideological conception of community drops out when the mission of forming a moral national community is transferred from orality and presence to print and deferral of presence.

III • POSTBELLUM

5 Looking in the Glass Sarah Piatt’s Poetics of Play and Loss

I n a n t e b e l lu m print culture, abolitionist women’s poetics sought to transform the audience into agents for historical change. Ideological tensions complicated this mission, specifically republican womanhood’s legacy of support for white male dominance, the limitations of sentiment as an antiracist strategy, and the unrepresentability of black-raced citizenship and kinship patterns. Related to these tensions were the rifts between radical abolitionism and the dominant conservative women’s culture over how women could properly participate in public life. The abolitionist movement stretched the gender bounds of republicanism, opening opportunities for women to engage in contestatory debate and using print as a supplement to face-to-face political forums; at the same time conservative women’s culture, emphasizing morality and national harmony, embraced print as a medium that could protect domestic privacy. By 1870, the end of slavery and the growth of capitalism changed the terms of women’s participation in public culture. Alliances formed in the abolitionist movement had broken down, and genteel literary culture, having retreated far from the political arena, was cultivating women’s roles as tasteful consumers rather than as arbiters of public virtue. Women’s poetics also changed. The moment was open-ended, the options multiple, but women’s poetry, like other cultural enterprises, took form and found voice in relation to the structures of post-emancipation racial modernity. Chapters 5 through 7 map out three divergent instances of women poets’ engagement with the restructuring of race. Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt writes from Ireland about the distant antebellum South in “A Child’s Party (in Kentucky, A.D. 185_)” (1883). In “Aunt Chloe” (1872), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper commits to a pamphlet published in Philadelphia stories she collected from the Reconstruction South, recording memories of slavery and the rise from slavery, for distribution to a diverse readership. In

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Loew’s Bridge, a Broadway Idyl (1867), Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert, a displaced Southerner, assumes the stance of a woman-poet-on-the-street in the jarring, masculinist public space of New York City. Varying in form and style, these three poems call for widely different reading strategies, and their status as candidates for recuperation and canonization also differs. All three poems, however, remap the antebellum treatments of race and gender. My selection of these poems began with a desire to avoid placing the whole burden of representing race on black writers. Efforts to articulate racial justice, however, are nearly absent from white women’s poetry after emancipation. Far more common are poems of dialect and stereotype, such as Mollie E. Moore Davis’s poems about Creole characters1 and Lizzie W. Champney’s “How Persimmons Took Cah ob der Baby,” the story of a tenacious but foolish black boy (discussed in chapter 9)—contributions to the pervasive plantation tradition, the fictive reinvention of the antebellum South as a happy world where racial hierarchies were just as they should be. A retrospective “dream of bliss,” in Zizek’s terms, the plantation tradition masks the terrors of national division and escalating racial violence while justifying the continuity of African American bondage. Plantation myth situates injustice not in the racial system but in the destruction of an innocent way of life; the restoration of social harmony depends on conforming the post-emancipation world to the nostalgic vision. Piatt’s poem, “A Child’s Party,” stands out in this context because, in portraying strong bonds between a white child and her enslaved caretakers, Piatt avoids stereotyping the black characters and exposes the construction of the white child’s race. And, while nostalgia floods this poem, Piatt complicates its affect with bitter exposures of her adult awareness of the racial system and its cost to the white child. My search for a black woman’s text to respond to Piatt’s imagining of antebellum intimacy between races did not lead to abundant possibilities. By the 1880s, when increased literacy and economic resources permitted a burgeoning of publications by African American authors, black women poets most often committed their authorship to themes of uplift rather than to representations of race. Henrietta Cordelia Ray, for example, published sonnets with such titles as “Self-Mastery” and “The Quest of the Ideal.” But Harper’s “Aunt Chloe” cycle, although published a decade before “A Child’s Party,” provides an effective response to the structure of feeling in

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Piatt’s poem, framing the personal bonds between slave and owner within the power relations of slavery. My sense of Lambert’s place in the dialogue between Piatt and Harper has changed since this research began. Recent scholarship misidentified Lambert as a mulatta who may have been passing; before I doubted the accuracy of this speculation, Loew’s Bridge seemed to challenge binarisms of race, reminding us about the complexities in racial identity and African American experience.2 That its author was actually white does not alter the poem’s concern with the construction of whiteness. Like Piatt, Lambert returns to the slave South to show a moment of white identity formation within the racial system, but for Lambert this moment is one of self-authorization, not affective complexity. Lambert’s text has appeal for a twentyfirst-century critical reading because she is engaged in the cultural criticism of modernity. Further, the self she presents and authorizes is that of an early “New Woman,” the modern female subject who emerged late in the nineteenth century as heir and usurper of the antebellum genteel ideal. Lambert’s poem thus extends a dialogic reading of Piatt and Harper both historically and theoretically, calling attention to the submerged role of racial difference in the formation of New Womanhood and raising cautions about how cultural criticism addresses race. To characterize the authors’ treatment of the temporal divide of emancipation, I read the three postbellum poems with questions about their recovery of the past. What evidence is there of a traumatic event that separates the experienced present from the remembered past? What is selected for remembrance, what is forgotten, and what does selective memory accomplish? What is recorded that may be in danger of being forgotten because it represents experiences marginal to the dominant telling of history? In what ways does the shape the author gives to a remembrance indicate a desire to speak as a representative of the center or to preserve a position of marginality? How are experiences of the past reinscribed through present struggles? How does the recovery of traces of the past within the self support or undermine present social agency? If memory reproduces an unrecoverable moment in the past as a blissful idyll of wholeness, what “trauma of inherent impossibility” (in Zizek’s words) does it cover over or compensate for?3 Each chapter also explores ways that these poems extend the ideological tensions surrounding the representation of race that were apparent in Han-

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nah Flagg Gould’s engagement in the female print culture of the 1830s. I compare how the three poets approach the reciprocal construction of black and white femininity and the political and epistemological status of sympathy. I look, too, at how race is construed in relationship to time, and how the poems handle questions of kinship and racial identity. Where in each poem do we see the contours of white patriarchy? Collecting signs of the relationship between poetry and the social world, I explore how each poem represents its own mediation from subject to audience, whether as an oral or a textual transaction; what kind of social future the poem envisions; and what role it suggests for itself in the life of a community. Further, are there risks specific to women in entering postbellum public discourse, and what ways does the poem offer of managing those risks? What attributes of identity authorize and modulate a modern poetic subject’s speech, and what attributes may or must be elided? • • • •

The poetry of Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt offers the distinctive pleasures of a skill trained by as thorough a classical and literary education as an upperclass woman of the mid–nineteenth century could obtain. At a time when literary reviews increasingly sorted cultural productions into higher and lower ranks, Piatt’s work was praised for its “very marked excellence.”4 The same reviewer compared her poetry with that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti. And, like high-Victorian poetry, much of Piatt’s work rewards formalist reading; her simple, regular meters are loaded with tonal and rhythmic variations and her dense diction resonates with hermeneutic possibilities. For literary scholars searching troves of forgotten women’s verse, her lyrics nourish the nearly inescapable hope of finding other Emily Dickinsons, other distinctively skilled craftswomen whose writing vibrates with a sense of the modern, the “unreality of all [life’s] shadowy phantasmagoria.”5 Recuperative scholarship on Piatt’s work gathered momentum in the 1990s, with Paula Bernat Bennett leading in the textual recovery and critical contextualization of her poems and, in 2001, publishing Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt.6 Piatt’s appearances in two new anthologies, however, are examples of problematic gestures in the recovery of women writers. American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (1993), the Library of America’s entry in current efforts to reconstruct a readership for a

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neglected field, includes only one poem by Sarah Piatt but five by her competent but unexceptional husband, John James Piatt. As was the case with other nineteenth-century poetic pairs (notably the Brownings and the Rossettis), except in feminist contexts, twentieth-century critics tended to promote the man’s career over the woman’s. The Penguin Classics reenvisioning of the field, Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (1996), edited by W. C. Spengemann and Jessica F. Roberts, adds a selection of Piatt’s poems to a roster that otherwise looks much like the selection in F. O. Matthiessen’s The Oxford Book of American Verse (1950), with Emily Dickinson the only other woman among seventeen poets. The cover copy for the Penguin collection claims it is intended “to suggest what nineteenth-century America contributed to the history of poetry, rather than what poetry may contribute to a history of nineteenth-century America.” Again, as was the case during the twentieth-century formation of the American literary canon, a canonizing agenda that defends poetry’s separateness from social forces results in the exclusion of all but a token few women writers. Yet much of Piatt’s work holds special interest for historicist study. “A Child’s Party (in Kentucky, A.D. 185_),” where Piatt takes an almost destructive stance toward white privilege in speaking of race and slavery, is one such poem. The venue for the poem’s first publication, the children’s magazine Wide-Awake, situates it distinctively in two linked historical processes, the construction of childhood and the construction of race. Beginning publication in 1875, Wide-Awake entered a growing marketplace for a new kind of children’s periodical—the lavish products of adults’ imaginative investment in romanticized norms of American childhood. Daniel Lothrop’s agenda as publisher of Wide-Awake differed from that of his chief competitor Mary Mapes Dodge, whose St. Nicholas Magazine dominated the children’s periodical market from 1874 well into the twentieth century.7 Lothrop held to a moral agenda allied with that of the Chautauqua movement: to cultivate children’s autonomy and guide their progress in “true good living.” Starting in 1881, Wide-Awake included a supplemental section of readings for young Chautauqua participants. For Lothrop, the evil from which literate children needed protection was sensational fiction: with the first issue, he announced his intention to offer a corrective to the “’run-away-to-sea’ style for boys, or the ‘elope-and-behappy’ incentive for girls.” For St. Nicholas, Dodge might have been not only rejecting the pious moralism that dominated antebellum children’s

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literature but also distinguishing her program from zealous self-improvement when she invoked childhood “mirthfulness” as an antidote to anything smacking of “youthful priggishness.”8 In the postbellum marketplace, Lothrop’s agenda held less popular ground. The circulation of Wide-Awake never exceeded about 30 percent of St. Nicholas’s circulation and, after Lothrop’s death in 1892, St. Nicholas absorbed Wide-Awake and subsumed his editorial agenda. The part that Wide-Awake played in the construction of race coincides with Lothrop’s self-making agenda for his young readers. Increasingly as Lothrop involved himself in the Chautauqua movement, the magazine tackled social issues, giving Wide-Awake at least a superficial appearance of being devoted to what educators today might call “diversity” or “multiculturalism.” Paging through the 1883 volume in which Piatt’s poem appeared, I was impressed by the sheer page space devoted to cultural “others.” Lothrop gave particular attention to Native Americans, publishing, for example, a long article by Margaret Sidney (Harriet Mulford Stone) about the Carlisle School for Indians in 1884. Sidney’s ambivalence toward indigenous cultures—she preaches of both their dignity and their savagery, from which the school was supposedly saving children—exemplifies the literary whiteness of Wide-Awake’s multiculturalism. The racial-ethnic other serves the purpose of cultivating philanthropy as an attribute of the white reading child. The school’s mission of abducting Indian children into a standardized “citizenship” also parallels the magazine’s mission for civilizing its young white readers through education. Lothrop had helped to launch plantation literature as appropriate reading for children by publishing Mollie Moore Davis’s dialect stories in the magazine’s second volume, but in the 1883 volume I found only two pieces other than Piatt’s devoted to African Americans: “Some Real Darkey Boys” by J. H. Moser and “Caryl’s Plum,” also by Margaret Sidney. Both stories, as well as Piatt’s poem, seem ambivalent about plantation mythology— both immersed and resistant—which is characteristic also of the Uncle Remus tales that the master of plantation fiction, Joel Chandler Harris, had begun to publish just two years earlier. Like Harris, the Wide-Awake authors intervene in racist caricatures only to reconstruct them.9 Moser’s mode is documentary, as if to correct flat stereotypes with the real truth: he tells how, some years earlier (but after emancipation), he made a collection of drawings of young black boys, which are printed with

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the story. He recounts his conversations with his models and diminishes racial differences by drawing parallels between their childhood experiences, such as crosstown rivalries, and his own. He takes pleasure in an account of one of his subjects’ avid reading of the Uncle Remus tales. He concludes that black boys are as intelligent as white boys but funnier. He does not have to commit himself to a belief in black inferiority to circumscribe the “darkey” boys’ social role. That black children are funny and their entertainment value is in some way redemptive seems also to be a point of Sidney’s story. Caryl, the white heroine of the title, finds a way to start a new life for her genteel little household, an aged aunt and two black female servants, impoverished presumably by the Civil War, although Sidney does not let her characters make any nostalgic reference to better times. Caryl’s “making good” story falls into the background, however, as Sidney focuses on the child servant Viny, a Topsy-like trickster figure who gives in to the temptation to dress up in her mistress’s clothes. Viny avoids punishment because her antics cheer up old Aunt Sylvia, and Sidney ends the story anticipating Viny’s career as a “good nurse” while launching Caryl’s as a tutor. Whatever is disruptive and absurd about Caryl’s determined self-transformation from genteel girl to self-reliant New Woman becomes Viny’s to act out; Viny is already a working girl. Taking for granted the class difference between the two girls’ aspirations, Sidney also consents to postslavery white dominance—the ideological project that plantation fiction served with great effectiveness. Like Moser’s drawings, Piatt’s poem, too, purports to be documentary. The speaker tells the “true” story of a party she and a slave child organized soon after her mother died. Details from Piatt’s life confirm that the poem’s frame is autobiographical, though the dates differ: born in 1836, she grew up in antebellum Kentucky and her mother died in 1844. The party is the idea of the speaker’s “dusky playmate,” whose viewpoint is that, with her mother “in the sky” and the “Old Mistress,” the grandmother, shut up in her room reading the Bible, the white child is free: “you can always have your way” (ll. 2–4). Mimicry is central in Piatt’s poem as it was in the story of Viny and Caryl; the slave child attends the party dressed as the white child’s grandmother, the moment that is captured in the illustration accompanying the poem in Wide-Awake. But in this story, both children together play trickster, momentarily disrupting the hereditary and racial markers of the social order. Their subversiveness takes the strenuous form

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of their removing objects from the parlor and a secret closet, carrying them outside, and setting them up on the lawn. The objects signify the white family’s patrician status: a mirror in which the child-I has seen her qualifications for playing the “lady,” a portrait of a female ancestor, candlesticks, china decorated with ancestral portraits, “solid silver.” The children prepare an elegant but inedible feast: Foam-frosted, dainty things that seemed— Not made of most delicious mud! (ll. 59–60)

Old Brother Blair, a freedman the children invite to their party, responds with consternation, as do the household slaves whom he alerts, and social authority descends on the children to halt their “free” play. The white child’s aged black nurse arrives to deliver the children from the other adults’ alarm: “Who blamed my child?” she said. “It makes My heart ache when they trouble you. . . .” (ll. 111–2)

She replaces the mudpies with real cakes, ending the escalating disturbance with nurture. Inverting the racial world of the abolitionist imagination, the world of “A Child’s Party” is one where the “freedom” of the white child depends upon the sympathetic intervention of female slaves. Deflecting blame from her white charge, the nurse provides an instance such as Zizek describes of the other’s mercy being an answering sign of the real, a gesture from outside that confirms the subject’s autonomy.10 “A Child’s Party” is a drama of the formation of white female selfhood within the institution of slavery, a setting where the organization of caretaking and childhood play transgresses racial difference even as subjects comply with the organization of social power.11 Piatt’s diction complicates the pleasures of the poem. Modifiers lend the presence of an adult wit turned wryly back on the scene, rendering ludicrous the white child’s claims of superiority. The parlor is “lonesome” and its wall shudders when the children take down, “in its antique majesty, / The gilded mirror dim and tall” (ll. 29, 31–2). The white woman in the portrait is “tired and fair,” hung in an “unhappy place on high.” Piatt casts the china in double entendre:

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There, with patrician dust half-hid, My ancestors, in china, were. (ll. 43–4) Were one of these on earth to-day, You’d know right well my blood was blue;— You’d own I was not common clay! (ll. 46–8)

If the child’s blood is blue, so very likely is the glaze with which her ancestors are represented. The child may not be made of “common clay,” but “ancestors in china” are made of some grade of clay. Conflating her forebears with the objects that represent them, the speaker also suggests that, by the time she tells the story, the china and the status it signified have disappeared from earth. The heightened diction of occasional stock poetic phrases—for instance, “A faint-green blossoming carpet” (l. 26) for the lawn in spring—calls attention to the ritualism of the children’s play. Ignored by adults at a time of crisis, the children appropriate decayed artifacts to improvise their own rite of passage and thus act out the possibility of cultural change. The poem’s speaker is subtly but deeply divided between being an unknowing child participant in this subversion and being an adult narrator who ridicules the child’s pretensions while relishing the party’s disruption of customary social practices. Even though the black child initiates the party, its details derive from the white child’s racial dominance, and it is the white child who initiates the black child’s cross-racial mimicry. The child-I’s understanding of social propriety means that, for the party to happen at all, the children need to abolish racial difference, with whiteness serving as the imaginative norm: “A party would be fine, and yet— There’s no one here I can invite.” “Me and the children.” “You forget—” “Oh, please, pretend that I am white.” (ll. 9–12)

This pretense materializes in the white child’s dressing up her playmate in her grandmother’s shawl and lace. Piatt emphasizes the white child’s raced narcissism; her mock-granny playmate is to set off her “own transcendent bloom and grace” (l. 68). But the black child would know about “playing white” from other contexts, particularly year-end festivals when adults dressed in their owners’ cast-off finery and satirized their manners, shaping slave culture out of traces of African culture in resistance to white domina-

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tion. While the subversiveness of slave performances had to be masked to avoid alarming the owner class, here, in Piatt’s poem, the white child is not only a witness but also an agent in the making of resistant culture—an agent whose stake in liberatory creativity, however, displaces those of her enslaved friend. The child-I, too, is parodying white femininity, wearing her “fairiest” shoes and a blushing-peach–colored hat (ll. 62, 64). It is this transgression about which Old Brother Blair first sounds the alarm: His voice was shaken and severe: “Here, Sisters in the Church,” he said, “Here—for old Satan’s sake, come here! “That white child’s done put on her best Silk bonnet. (It looks like a rose!) And this black little imp is dressed In all Old Mistress’ finest clothes.” (ll. 98–104)

Both girls are “tricked out” (to borrow Gould’s phrase for the mummy), but to the authority figure who raises alarms about their transgression, the black child’s racial cross-dressing is a secondary violation, the primary one being the white child’s dressing up as a heightened version of herself in a bonnet that signifies the flowery metaphysics of white womanhood. The adult-I, too, treats white femininity as a problem, exposing its iconography to critique. Although she stresses the racial otherness of both the slave child and the nurse—both appear “weird” (ll. 73, 106)—the stanzas of dialogue allow rigorously equal space to the playmate’s distinctive subjectivity. In the children’s quarrel, the black child is observer, the white child other, with the effect of exposing white standards of beauty as racially specific, neither universal nor innocent: “I’ll be the lady, for, you see, I’m pretty,” I serenely said. “The black folk say that you would be If–if your hair just wasn’t red.” “I’m pretty anyhow, you know. I saw this morning that I was.” “Old Mistress says it’s wicked, though, To keep on looking in the glass.” (ll. 17–24)

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The white child’s grandmother might have passed on to the young slave the same lore about the danger of narcissism that Piatt captured in her popular children’s poem “The Witch in the Glass,” in which a mirror is said to reflect back a red-mouthed witch who will tell a child “the very thing I should not know.” Spoken by a white adult, this gothic wisdom might signify only the suppression of childhood impulses. But Piatt’s channeling it into “A Child’s Party” through a black slave child’s viewpoint on a white child’s self-perception gives the dangers of self-regard a racial edge, as in Forten’s “An Appeal to Women” (discussed in chapter 3). The costumes and decorations that the children choose for their party are trappings of white status, but their removing the heirlooms from their proper places desecrates them even as it hypostasizes them. Parodically confirming white dominance, the children act out against it. The black child, skilled at improvisation, understands parody in both its socially inverting and its socially enabling dimensions. Piatt pointedly contrasts the white child’s misgivings about her playmate’s transgressive costume with the black child’s glee about playing the white grandmother, a role that takes her out of slavery and into the ruling class:12 “You’ll be my grandmama,” I sighed, After much thought, somewhat in fear. She, joyous, to her sisters cried: “Call me Old Mistress!—do you hear?” (ll. 69–72)

When the white child claims that the party needs a gentleman guest, the black child eases the child-I’s social rigidity by listing reasons why Brother Blair can fit the role: he no longer works in the field, he is free, he is a preacher, and her family is proud to have him over to their cabin for dinner. Social codes of the black community here momentarily overwhelm the dominant white rules, of which the child-I is the lone representative. For the slave child, the party is a chance to celebrate the death of one white adult and the absence of another, circumstances she interprets as liberty for the white child, if not for herself. In a wryly fierce aside, Piatt underscores the white child’s stake in collaborating with her playmate by showing how their improvisations disrupt the historical traces of her own privileged identity. The portrait that the children remove from “her unhappy place on high,” she guesses, was “painted by / Ignotus”—artist unknown (ll. 33–5).13 The reference to Robert Browning’s “Pictor Ignotus”

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withholds this ancestral icon from commodity status—Browning’s painter withdrew from the popular market, as Piatt did not. But this remark also prods at the family’s aristocratic pretensions since no known artist took an interest in painting their forebear. And it reflects on the child-I’s condition: unhappy on high, ignored, unknown. No white relatives or friends pay any attention to her on this critical day. Only slaves mitigate the misery of her status as a white female. This situation is deeply narcissistic—as is the white child’s stake in subverting the racial system—because, while her playmate and nurse know her, she does not need to know them back. The subject dresses both of them up as her own gaze: the child-I costumes her playmate as a parodic icon of white matriarchy whose presence enhances her own femininity; and, nearly at the end of the poem, the adult-I similarly costumes her nurse as an icon of strong black womanhood whose love absolves her of unknowing crimes. The racial stakes for the white child differ in these two instances: for the party to happen she must be white and beautiful; for the party to be innocent she must belong to a woman of color (“Who blames my child?”) who, in fact, belongs to her. Moving from the one to the other, Piatt dismantles the iconography of white femininity and enshrines an icon of black womanhood. In the last few stanzas, Piatt banishes the party and the black child with it, replacing them with mythic descriptions of the female household slaves. The cook is Vesta, the maid like the old woman of the nursery rhyme who swept the cobwebs from heaven (except that she sweeps them from the earth). Piatt devotes a stanza to the old nurse: Then there was one bent to the ground;— Her hair, than lilies not less white, With a bright handkerchief was crowned; Her lovely face was weird as night. (ll. 103–6)

An earlier poem about this same woman, “My Old Kentucky Nurse,” was Piatt’s most anthologized; it was the one poem by her, for example, that Whittier chose for Songs of Three Centuries (1877).14 “I knew a Princess,” Piatt begins this poem, devoting eleven tetrameter ABAB quatrains (the building block she reused in “A Child’s Party”) to dismantling the lore of fairy books, piecing together a revisionary representation of this princess’s nobility and beauty:

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Not of the Lamp, not of the Ring, The helpless, powerful Slave was she, But of a subtler, fiercer Thing: She was the slave of Slavery. Court-lace nor jewels had she seen: She wore a precious smile, so rare That at her side the whitest queen Were dark,—her darkness was so fair. (ll. 17–24)

Even amid such fanciful diction, Piatt does not flinch from naming race and slavery. Blackness as an abstract quality, however, retains its conventional moral spin, compromising her claim that black is beautiful. Death arrives as a knight errant to carry the enslaved princess across the river: The Knight of the Pale Horse, he laid His shadowy lance against the spell That hid her Self: as if afraid, The cruel blackness shrank and fell. (ll. 33–6)

Is slavery the blackness that has masked her essence, or is it skin color (as in William Blake’s “The Little Black Boy”)? Is Piatt finely drawing a distinction between the “fair darkness” of racial appearance and the “cruel blackness” of raced oppression, or, in the latter phrase, essentializing the link between being black and being treated cruelly, as if it were the fault of skin color rather than of the oppressor? “My Old Kentucky Nurse” ends similarly to “A Child’s Party” with lines about the bond between the nurse and the white child she cared for: –On me, I think, far, faint, and fond, Her eyes to-day look, yearning, down. (ll. 43–4)

Even separated by death, the speaker imagines herself the beneficiary of the nurse’s sympathy. That Piatt does not call the nurse “Mammy” in these poems is not casual; she also avoids naming some of the stereotypical features of Mammy in her visual description of the nurse. Instead of a grin revealing gleaming white teeth that comically contrast to her dark skin,15 Piatt describes lily-white hair, bringing the floral symbology of white womanhood into her description of the nurse. Nor does her black princess in any simple way replicate the speechless, pleading victim of abolitionist typol-

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ogy. In both poems Piatt’s language for black people shifts continually, as if she were experimenting with ways to represent them that evade stereotyping. But the final narcissistic vision of her nurse as her own eternal audience in “My Old Kentucky Nurse” is a strangely disappointing end for a reader drawn to Piatt’s self-conscious treatment of race. “A Child’s Party” can be read as a narrative background for “My Old Kentucky Nurse,” explaining why Piatt wanted to write her nurse as a magic figure. “A Child’s Party,” too, ends with a letdown. The first lines of the last stanza divide tears between the child subject and the adult subject and between a fresh and a bitter emotion: Tears made of dew were in my eyes (These after-tears are made of brine): . . . (ll. 115–6)

Here Piatt complicates the sentimental trope of salvation through sympathetic weeping; these tears mark the subject’s emergence into a consciousness beyond selfishness and vanity, but one such birth is not enough for the story as she tells it. Do the tears change because of the adult-I’s later understanding of slavery and racism, or do they change because the whole world where the child-I found nurture is gone? Are the adult’s tears bitter enough to suggest to the reader that the love flooding her nostalgic vision depended on a violent system which must not be restored? The closing lines, conventional praise for the dead, come out in sing-song iambs, as if Piatt simply gave up on the complexities of prosody and diction and resigned herself to the temporariness of disruptions of convention: No sweeter soul is in the skies Than hers, my mother’s nurse and mine. (ll. 117–8)

Displacing the children’s play as crisis threatens their innocence—the crisis of recognizing that they have broken rules—the nurse’s appearance halts the subject’s working through of her raced identity within slavery. Although both “My Old Kentucky Nurse” and “A Child’s Party” clearly resist the myth that all was well in the old South, Piatt’s representation of the nurse as an object of nostalgic obsession rooted in childhood, particularly in the later poem, works finally to divert her critique of race and slavery. In the real world of the institution of slavery, the figure of the black nurse stands for the child-I’s raced enjoyment of ownership and privilege and for white motherhood’s deferring the materiality of nurture to slaves—be-

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queathing “foam-frosted, dainty things” to their children while their nurses feed them real cakes. As Piatt situates her in the narration, the iconic nurse also serves as an agent to break agency—the contesting agencies of the subversive children and the conservative adults; she releases the poem from politics. Turning away from social issues, Piatt’s poems turn toward personalized aesthetic experience, toward detailing complexities in the mingling of beauty and emotion. Even as it problematizes beauty, “A Child’s Party” is aesthetically driven, its endpoint a standby of lyricism and sentimentality: the feeling of love and loss. This emotion, however, is not as simplistic as the prosody of the closing lines makes it seem. From the first word of “A Child’s Party,” Piatt signals a temporal distortion in the feeling of love and loss: Before my cheeks were fairly dry, I heard my dusky playmate say: “Well, now your mother’s in the sky, And you can always have your way.” (ll. 1–4)

“Before” here means “after”—after the child-I’s mother died, with the endurance of teardrops measuring the brief interval between her being orphaned and her celebrating freedom with her slave friend. Announcing the sad event in this way, the speaker trivializes her childhood grief. The childself may not know exactly why she has wept; the slave child, not the childI, names what has happened, interprets the event, and thinks of what to do about it. The slave girl thus works as the white child’s uninhibited double, an agent of transgressive celebration. Acting out her emancipation from white adult control defers the child-I’s realization that she has been orphaned, a realization that does not come in the poem. Her mother disappears into the paraphernalia of her ancestry to be mentioned again only in the last line, after the poem’s feeling has built and concentrated on the nurse: “my mother’s nurse and mine.” “Mother” bears none of the load of affect that sentimental poetics endowed on this most iconic of figures, appropriated for abolitionist poetics as a focus for cross-racial sympathy. The link between speaker and mother in these closing lines is that between two generations of children who enjoyed ownership of the black woman and her care. The adult speaker implicitly ranks her nurse at least equal to her mother in heaven: “No sweeter soul is in the skies.” Reference to the nurse too is deferred; although at the

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end of the poem she becomes the most important figure in it, there is no hint of her before the last four stanzas. Next to no words are devoted to telling the nurse’s own story: Did she have a name? Was she a mother who had lost children of her own? The children’s party is narrated with markers of sequence—“and then . . . next . . . then”—but the nurse’s iconic appearance interrupts causality and ends sequence. The story of the party belongs to linear time, the nurse to timelessness. Sometime between the party and its narration, the nurse has died. In the last stanza the speaker situates her “in the skies” to which the black child confined the child-I’s mother in the first stanza. Thus the end of the poem loops back to the beginning: shallow grief gives way to grief doubled between childhood and adulthood, still unrelieved. Piatt is showing a crisis, generated by child-care practices within the institution of slavery, in the conventions linking sentiment to upper-class, white kinship structures. Hints of the adult speaker’s present awareness give the story its ironic cast, but although she undermines the worth of her child-self ’s feelings, she holds space open for the feeling that floods the closing stanzas. The adult’s arch diction marks the temporal distance between the poem’s present, the time when the story is being told, and “A.D. 185_,” the past when its events took place. But that distance also shows in sparse affective asides, such as the mention of dew and brine tears in the last stanza. The first cue of the subject’s self-conscious split between past and present comes during the planning of the party after the black child urges: “Oh, please, pretend that I am white.” I said, and think of it with shame, “Well, when it’s over, you’ll go back There to the cabin all the same, And just remember you are black.” (ll. 13–6)

The adult reflects ruefully on her childhood stake in assuring that the disruption of the racial order was fictive and temporary. In one line only, in the midst of the stanzas about the children’s hauling out the family heirlooms, Piatt also adds the frame of oral storytelling: “(Hush, child, this splendid tale is true!)” (l. 45). As specifically as the title documents the story’s place in history, the child listener seems to find it no more credible than other splendid tales—its place and time are legendary. Yet the present of the adult’s storytelling is far less specified, more gen-

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eric, than the time of the party. All we know is that, implicitly some time after the demise of the plantation system, a woman is telling a child a story about something that happened when the system existed. In another aside describing what the children find in the secret closet, Piatt ironizes nostalgic return: There too, long hid from eyes of men, A shining sight we two did see. Oh, there was solid silver then In this poor hollow world—ah me! (ll. 51–2)

The present, postbellum world may be hollow like the handles of cheap silverplate flatware, but the old, antebellum world was not an age of solid gold; it was a grade below. Piatt further undermines the value of the age’s substance by following this passage two stanzas later with the delicacies whose substance, though it seemed not to be, was mud. That the silver belongs to a time vaguely farther back (like Gould’s mummy and her musical trinket) exemplifies how the child-I’s present is wholly embedded in her family’s past. Unlike the slaves, who have sisters to joke with, family dinners with guests, and Sundays with Brother Blair preaching, the white child has no social present beyond the party and the relics of her status. What trauma marks the temporal line between the speaker’s present and the past that she reconstructs? The story follows an assumedly traumatic event, the death of her mother, but the feeling of love and loss finds no adequate signifier in her mother. Undermining its framework within the conventions of sentimental poetics, grief flows on under the metonymic series of inherited objects and rules until it finds the nurse. The child may weep from gratitude for the sympathy of this powerful figure who saves the party from being ruined by the other black adults’ collaboration in the social rules that the children violated. The adult may weep out of missing her nurse, but with the salt of her tears comes the shame she feels in retrospect about her own childhood implication in the racial system: our game will end, you will become black again, and I’ll make sure you remember to return to your place. Yet, on this day, the white social world exists only in the children’s mimicry of it; the white child is immersed in a racially synthetic community that, however necessary, is possible only through distortion of the rules. The nurse’s intercession allows this synthesis to carry on in innocence,

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but the adult recaptures traces of the transgressive knowledge that the children unconsciously exposed: that the white child’s social position was constructed out of objects and practices whose “awfulness” could be called into question, that whites were dependent on blacks for every aspect of their status—household care and child tending, pleasure and cheering, substitution when their own social system failed them through vacancies in key roles. This knowledge gives the subject a place to shift to, out of the center of racial dominance and into a border zone. It is this color border zone that Piatt captures in the icon of the nurse with her lily-white hair, bright kerchief-crown, and “lovely face” as “weird as night.” Chastening her child-I’s sense of a white female self, the adult speaker drives both parts of the divided subject to abjection before this icon. The speaker’s parenthetical “Hush, child!” implies that her listener is having difficulty holding still; something in the poem is beyond the comprehension or interest of childhood, or at least of a postbellum childhood lived far from a Kentucky plantation. For the new generation of children, the readers of Wide-Awake, the cross-racial culture of slavery may be no more understandable than the mummy’s world is to Gould’s child speaker. Piatt thus encodes in this brief reference to the storytelling frame the adult subject’s own aloneness as she returns to the color border zone to retrieve the party and the nurse from the secret closet of her past. The story must be told although she has imagined no sympathetic adult audience. Even her relationship to the child auditor is in question; is it her child, or perhaps the distant, unknown reader of a children’s magazine? The story undermines the essentialness that sentimentality endowed on the mother-child bond. Mother can be replaced even in heaven; indeed, Piatt vacates all white kinship relations (she omitted from the poem the sister who lived on their grandmother’s plantation with her after their mother’s death), finding kinship language everywhere among the slaves (Brother Blair, sisters in the church). Framing this story as she does, Piatt paints herself into a narrow margin where the authenticity of her past is in question (“this splendid tale is true”) and she longs still for the saving gaze of the dead nurse. What is Piatt remembering, and what is she forgetting, in this journey backwards across the abolition of slavery? She saves the complex experience of growing up dependent on people of a different race, within a social system that elaborately coded where power lay in the intimate cross-racial relationships that the system made inevitable. Her archaeology of her own

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racial inheritance is antimemorial—objects that signify the dominant racial memory are ripped out of where they belong and made into props for a collaborative enactment of a new society that grotesquely parodies the old. What is missing from the story as Piatt tells it is what would have happened to the children if the nurse had not interceded. If, in slavery, adult slaves discovered a white child and a black child playing with the “sacred” and “awful” possessions of the white family, who would have been punished? With no white authorities present to reinforce the color line for the white child, it is unlikely that she would feel the sting of discipline. If a whipping were due, it would fall on the slave.16 Isolated in a woman-child dyad in the storytelling present, the speaker retrieves from the institutional framework of her past the other-raced community that sustained her, but she forgets oppression. Her later, adult understanding that an oppressive system formed her (selfish and vain, much as the abolitionists Elizabeth Chandler and Sarah Forten predicted white females would become in relation to black women) may be what tinges her retrospective judgment of herself with shame and “brine.” Piatt may have omitted the punitive consequence of the children’s play, whether for herself, her playmate, or both, precisely in order to replace discipline with mercy, just as the nurse replaces the possibility of physical pain with physical nurture. Piatt may have wanted to remove the chain of causality that physically subjects bodies to the social order and to keep open the possibility that transgression could occur with impunity, that there could be play in the relations between races. Yet Piatt’s “forgetting” of oppression also marks the invisibility of the children’s subversiveness to white adults and thus their powerlessness against social forces greater than Brother Blair and the house slaves. In the actual United States of 1883, as opposed to the legendary Kentucky of 185_, the infrastructure of Reconstruction was collapsing and the long era of escalating antiblack terrorism had begun. That the wish for innocent cross-racial play has a strong aesthetic bent—and at best a slippery grasp of either the real power relations institutionalized in slavery or those emerging afterward—comes to the fore in Piatt’s “The Old Slave Music” (1873), written in the North before her stay in Ireland.17 In gorgeous, grieving diction, the poem contrasts the “savage and fierce and glad” music of slaves to sobbing and sighing music—the kind of song that flourished in nineteenth-century parlors. Slave music, Piatt says, was “music and music

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alone,” the thing-in-itself, and the music made its performers “free,” essential “happy women and men.” Frederick Douglass had given an entirely different view of this music in his autobiography,18 but Piatt would not have needed to leave the white literary mainstream to read Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s essay for Atlantic about anguish and coded communication in slave music.19 The speaker in Piatt’s “Old Slave Music” is inventing a modernism beyond sentimentality through a misapprehension of slave culture, holding the music she remembers empty of any affect or message other than a joyous in-itselfness. The last stanza of “The Old Slave Music” is especially disturbing, suggesting that in ending slavery, the Union destroyed the music, and that it was not a worthwhile trade: Hush, hush—I know it, I say; Your armies were bright and brave, But the music they took away Was worth—whatever they gave. (ll. 29–32)

What emancipation took away, in fact, was the privilege of wealthy white Southerners to experience themselves as the chosen consumers of a music supposed to be pure and messageless. Similarly, the play in “A Child’s Party”—as the speaker seems not to confront fully—is as much a playing to a narcissistic appetite as it is a loosening of the racial system’s links. The adult speaker both scathes that appetite and mourns the loss of the other who rendered it innocent, a woman who, in memory at least, complied so well with her role in slavery that she replaced mother as the subject’s primary desire. That the nurse not only substitutes for white motherhood but also stands in benignly for white patriarchy arises when we track a forgetfulness that “A Child’s Party” has in common with abolitionist poetics: it lacks fathers. Brother Blair (also called “Uncle Sam,” a nickname for the United States since 1812) is the only representative of his gender, and the children’s wish to include him in their play brings the party to a halt. Whether the children are aware of it or not, a lady’s party requires a “gentleman” to spice it with the rites of the sex-gender system: flirtation, courtship, chivalry. In this respect, as in Brother Blair’s being alarmed about the white child’s exaggerated self-feminization, it is the possibility that the children’s game will include heterosexuality among its targets of cross-racial parody which re-

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duces the party to an alarming impossibility. Brother Blair is the proxy for white patriarchy, both as an invited “gentleman” guest and as policer of the children’s transgression of racial difference. Failing to add a gentleman to their party, the children gain the nurse, who becomes Brother Blair’s replacement. In memory, in poetry, the nurse thus metonymically substitutes for the white patriarchal social order, organizing and legitimizing the children’s play, protecting its transgressiveness from consequence. As a figurative presence in postbellum women’s poetics, the nurse thus represents a protective barrier around poetry’s autonomy, helping to create a free space far from the white-male–dominated larger world. Like Gould in “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy,” Piatt links the play of poetry with childhood and stages a scenario in which an oral folk culture serves as the material for literate verse. Differences between the poems arise from their historical distance from one another: the oratorical, republican child is absent from Piatt’s poem, and the oral culture is a racially specified, living presence. Further, Piatt’s poem represents a much-developed phase in the transformation of orality—from the means of transmission to the means of consumption—that is evident everywhere in postbellum children’s verse and already in process as Gould’s child gazes at the mummy’s bared teeth. In “A Child’s Party,” the white candidate for lore-telling crone (the figure associated with oral transmission in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century development of children’s literature) is elsewhere reading the Bible, immersed in the anticommunal consolation of literacy. The white grandmother’s wisdom enters the poem but only transformed into a black child’s observation, and it acts as a critical pause that must be bypassed if the play is to proceed. The nurse has no lore, not even a life story; what she has is cakes. Just as Piatt imagines slave songs to be “pure” music, devoid of story, she posits the nurse as a figure of pure nurture. The “sweet” soul of the black nurse helps to assure that poetry itself, however remote from and marginal to the social forces whose traces it necessarily reflects, feeds the taste not with foam-frosted semblances but with real cakes. Piatt thus produces the aesthetic, the field of taste, by working ideological tensions carried over from antebellum representations of the racial structure through to an impossible limit. Her interventions in the dynamics of racial construction expose white female dependency on black women not only for creating white leisure through their work but also for filling and enhancing white leisure time. As agents of play, black women engage

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the white girl in her embodiment: lifting and carrying, arguing about hair color, playing with mud, eating real as opposed to false cakes. The disembodied icon of white womanhood withers while the embodied icon of black womanhood transcends. Piatt deeply ironizes sympathy by making the newly orphaned white child the object of an unpitying critique. Nowhere are slave women drawn to inspire pity; instead, the nurse and playmate are originators of practical sympathetic action on behalf of the orphan, whether she deserves their concern or not. The double record of tears at the end makes aesthetic tension out of a resource of sentimentality. Whereas sentimental writing elicits the reader’s bodily response of weeping as a sign of sympathy for a character’s suffering, in “A Child’s Party” this transaction takes place within the speaker’s memorial process, so that she herself is the reader of her own story. Instead of working outward through the reader’s agency, sentiment collapses inward, into the inner workings of the poem. “A Child’s Party” moves away from ideological tensions related to the public sphere into unresolved conundrums of affect, kinship, and race. Piatt distances the domestic circles of both the storied past and the narrative present from male dominance, but its contours tell in the boundaries of both settings. The white child’s wish to draw a representative of white patriarchy into her play brings instead her nurse who, by redeeming the children’s transgressions of racial proprieties, indirectly redeems the patriarchal order. By endowing the bond between child and slave with greater feeling than that which marks the relationship between child and mother, Piatt renders white kinship relations problematic: it is paradoxically the white child who is kinless in slavery. Even her grandmother gets named for her role in the slave system, “Old Mistress.” Kinship names bind the slaves except for the nurse, who is named for her care-taking relationship to whites. The emotions she arouses in the white child, though similar to the kinship feelings that abolitionists sought to stir, remains unnamed; these emotions fester unrelieved into the speaker’s adulthood and inspire no action other than storytelling. Piatt represents the medium of transmission for her poem as oral, from mother to child, fully in conformity with conservative female republicanism, and sets the exchange in a private sphere yet more hermetic than genteel women’s culture conceived. The storytelling present is far more constricted than the past, as if the social world beyond the woman-child dyad

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were inaccessible to them or as if to render their activities autonomous, hermetically apart from those of adult men. Piatt’s representation of the forming of white female subjectivity, however, deflates the conservative mission for women: to model gentility and morality. Gentility is a collection of junk, and white womanhood is corrupted by its protections. Further, if the speaker is trying to form a child listener’s subjectivity for the sake of the nation’s future, she is failing, at least for the present. That something about the story is incomprehensible or uninteresting to the poem’s juvenile audience, and that rueful irony laces the adult’s telling, indicate an adult agenda that has a public, political dimension which is suppressed, contained, or underdeveloped. Piatt is at least partially withholding her memories of the antebellum from the plantation tradition’s cultural work of justifying post-emancipation racial oppression. To the extent that Piatt retrieves memories and crafts language to set against racist stereotypes, the poem’s agenda is antiracist, but Piatt seems resigned to the lack of a comprehending audience and offers no action or analysis in the present. Everything—politics, morality, affect—folds in on itself, ironized, ambiguous. The enduring outcome of conflict and conciliation in the past is the formation of emotional complexity. Not only is it difficult to see how Piatt’s poem addresses postbellum race relations; it is also difficult to fathom her adult subject’s self-reflection about race. If Frances Harper read the poem, she might find the bitter tears at the end little different from a mistress’s selfish groans over the loss of her slaves, an incident she recounts in “Aunt Chloe.” But Piatt may well know what Harper would tell her, that slavery constructed her emotional bond with a slave woman. She may have an idea, too, that print will find adult readers who understand her story, whose own self-division it speaks. In this respect, “A Child’s Party” models self-recognition, inside knowledge of a peculiarly marginalized subjectivity, that of a white subject whose formation within slavery has left her, after emancipation, enmeshed in guilt and grief. Where Piatt’s speaker seems to fall short of self-awareness is in her mockery of Brother Blair: It was his pride, as I had heard, To study the New Testament (In which he could not spell one word). (ll. 85–8)

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The stern and puritanical Brother Blair is the reader within the poem. His “reading” of the children’s play reflects back to the white child an aura of sexual precocity. He is an audience that exposes female cultural production to a disruptive self-knowledge, marking a limit beyond which the girls’ cross-racial play loses its innocence. If Piatt was indeed unaware of the resistance to black literacy implicit in the above lines, they may encode anxiety about the effect an educated black male citizenry, a racially different literate audience, could have on women’s cultural production. Her mockery of Brother Blair’s spelling, however, also underscores her nostalgic stake in the only kind of community she represents in this poem—performative, oral, present, a community where literacy is the exception. To commit this poem to print was to preserve an oral world in which for her, perhaps, the least tolerable transgression of racial difference was the other’s ability to read and write. Black people who could “spell” would be compromised as keepers of a lyric time, a suspended dream world on the other side of terror for which the lyric language of post-emancipation whiteness, structured by racial modernity, reaches and grieves.

6 We Women Radicals Frances Harper’s Poetics of Racial Formation

R e a d i n g Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “The Deliverance” (1872) invites strategies of contextualization that are not available for Sarah Piatt’s “A Child’s Party” or Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert’s Loew’s Bridge. At sixty quatrains, “The Deliverance” is the longest of the six poems in “Aunt Chloe,” a first-person narrative cycle whose overall patterns are missed if the cycle is not read as a whole. Further, Harper is today the best known of these three poets, the one whose writing is most widely available and the first one on whom a moderately substantial body of criticism has developed,1 not only about her poetry and fiction but also about her historical role as an activist. Little has been published on the “Aunt Chloe” cycle as a whole, and much of what exists makes critical gestures characteristic of the early stages of an author’s recuperation. Framing Harper as a precursor to the modernism of the Harlem Renaissance, critics have focused on the narrator’s colloquial speech, agreeing that it enhances Chloe’s authenticity and avoids the stereotypical restriction of expressive range that much dialect writing imposes on black characters.2 Critics who admire Harper but are put off by the didacticism of much of her poetry appreciate the “Aunt Chloe” cycle; Joan R. Sherman, for instance, notes a wit and irony uncharacteristic of Harper in these poems and praises them for being unsentimental.3 Melba Joyce Boyd, who did give a full reading of the cycle in Discarded Legacies, says of Aunt Chloe and other of Harper’s characters that they “speak fluidly and intelligently about enslavement, the Civil War, literacy, religion, and electoral politics. Speaking their own consciousness, their tongues are rounded from injustice and embellished with insightful imagery.”4 And, indeed, the sense of Chloe as a real and trustworthy witness, her storytelling enriched by folk humor and wisdom, is the cycle’s great attraction.

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Yet Harper was never, as Chloe was, a slave; Chloe’s authenticity is an achievement of Harper’s literary skill. While the former slaves Harper met as she traveled in the post-emancipation South were one source for Chloe’s voice and story, another source was Harper’s resistance to the voice and story of another Chloe, Uncle Tom’s wife, a mammy figure who speaks in a thick dialect. Readers who come to “Aunt Chloe” with a fresh familiarity with Iola Leroy will be startled to see that Chloe is the prototype for Aunt Linda in Harper’s later novel. Nearly all of the narrative elements in the “Aunt Chloe” cycle reappear in the novel, but in the twenty years that separate the verses from the prose, the character has reverted to the type Stowe had created: round, nurturing, comically voluble, expert at making biscuits and fried chicken. In becoming Linda, Chloe also yielded center place in the story of the transition from slavery to freedom to Iola Leroy, a young mulatta who, ignorant of her racial mixture until she is remanded to slavery when her planter-father dies, brings to the role of racial spokesperson the benefits of breeding and education equivalent to those of an upperclass white woman. Underlying Chloe’s authenticity is a systematic theory of racial uplift that informed Harper’s post-emancipation activism—a set of ideas whose origin she embodied in a figure of folk feminism at this early stage. Twenty years later, during the period that has been described as the nadir of American race relations because of the extent of antiblack terrorism and legal repression,5 Harper no longer found folk wisdom sufficient to the task of uplift; she subordinated the voice of Chloe-Linda to debates among an educated racial elite. “The Deliverance,” the second poem in the cycle, calls attention to the grit that may corrupt the exchange of sweetness between races, whether in the domestic or the political sphere. With the end of slavery, the advocacy politics of abolitionism gives way in Harper’s cycle to stories about liberatory forces that originated within slavery and post-emancipation communities’ own delimitations of support roles for outsiders. In the formation of individual and collective raced identities, the politics of self-help eventually draws subjects away from the public sphere into the family and home. As a model of activism, Chloe differs from the readers and mothers whom abolitionist poetics sought to convert to historical agency; slavery has disrupted her role as a mother and withheld literacy from her. But Chloe will end her days as a matriarch who reads religious texts; literacy is to replace slave religion in supporting a black household and community, a fragile

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autonomous space that illustrates the poetics of a modern consciousness that cannot look backward for a lyric time. The six poems of “Aunt Chloe” are the first-person narration of the title character, a former slave. “The Deliverance” follows an untitled prologue; then follow “Aunt Chloe’s Politics,” “Learning to Read,” “Church Building,” and “The Reunion.” The cycle first appeared in Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a slim book of poems that Harper wrote to retell stories she heard in the South during extended lecture tours from 1867 to 1871. Endowing Chloe with abundant speech, Harper moves well beyond the image of the “inarticulate sufferer” that she and others had exploited in their abolitionist verse. Linked like the chapters of a novel or the phases of a history, the individual segments of “Aunt Chloe” trace the emergence of a free black community. The first line of the untitled prologue announces the cycle’s memorial purpose: “I remember, well remember.” Chloe’s story begins with her recalling the day her two young sons were sold; the master has died, and probate reveals that he badly mismanaged the plantation, leaving his widow in debt. With the white patriarch gone and the social system crumbling, the price to be exacted is the break-up of an African American family. “The Deliverance” covers the “kind” rule of the dead master’s son Thomas, the Civil War, emancipation, Reconstruction, and struggles surrounding voting rights. The possibility of freedom comes to Chloe at first as an inkling about the reasons for the war. When the young master enlists in the Confederate army, the house feels empty to Chloe, who identifies with her mistress’s woe. Nevertheless she suspects slavery is at issue: I thought ’twould all come right, For I felt somehow or other We was mixed up in that fight. (ll. 58–60)

Like Harper’s Iola Leroy, “The Deliverance” structures the formation of subjectivity in relation to phases of the Civil War—for Harper’s Chloe in contrast to Stowe’s, a subjectivity that becomes emotionally emancipated from the domestic affairs of her mistress. And, as in her novel, Harper shows gender to be an “axis of struggle” distinct from race: still-disenfranchised women chasten their husbands to defer immediate material gain for the sake of engaging in electoral politics for the benefit of the race.6 Harper shows the sharp tongue associated with the Sapphire stereotype to be an in-

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strument of political critique rather than a means by which black women collaborate with the racial system to degrade black men. The poems that follow “The Deliverance” depict the formation of the postbellum black community’s institutions: politics, education, religion, and the family. In “Aunt Chloe’s Politics,” Chloe pauses from historical narrative to express her concern that corruption, both white and black, robs the community of funds for education. In “Learning to Read,” Chloe records the arrival of “Yankee” teachers in the South. The schools they start provoke the hostility of the “Rebs”—“It was agin’ their rule.” The wartime slang for Northerners and Southerners persists; the war continues in civilian forms and that southern proscriptions of education for black people, though officially abolished, remain very much alive. Chloe recalls the subterfuges by which some slaves learned to read. Nearing sixty, she now determines to become literate herself and, once she can read “the hymns and Testament,” achieves a measure of sovereignty that she doubles by moving into a cabin of her own: “And I felt as independent / As the queen upon her throne.” Alone with scripture, Chloe has become a liberal Protestant individualist. But in “Church Building,” Harper enlarges Chloe’s double gesture of autonomy—reading religious texts on her own, having a house—by depicting the establishment of a communal house of worship, paid for collectively out of savings from “scanty” wages. “The Reunion” closes the series with the promise that Chloe’s family will be restored. Again as in Iola Leroy, people who had been sold away from their birthplaces search for their mothers after the war. Chloe’s son Jakey appears in town bringing news of his brother Ben, who has married and had children. Chloe invites them all to come live with her in an expanded sovereign domain: “And we’ll make the cabin bigger, / And that will hold us all.” For Piatt and Lambert, the past returns in isolated vignettes; for Harper it involves a tracing of continuities. The temporal movement of “Aunt Chloe” is chronological, spanning a decade or more from sometime before the formation of the Confederacy (1860–1861) until the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant (1869–1877), the present of her narration. The progression traces the emergence of individual and communal black identities out of enslavement and into the theorizing and strategizing of free political subjecthood. By mingling Chloe’s “I” with a communal “we” in this sequential story, Harper suggests that, following Chloe’s separation from her children, there is virtually no discernible gap between Chloe as an individual figure

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reconstructing a personal past and Chloe as a representative figure narrating a collective past. In “The Deliverance” especially, Chloe ties local progressions to national events; her story becomes a history, the personal significance of her life identical to its political significance. Harper frames no single internal audience for Chloe’s narration but fills the stanzas with Chloe’s reports of others’ words; her story is the community’s story. The entire cycle is made up of ABCB ballad quatrains, an easy stanza to compose and absorb—a ready crossover between print and oral transmission. Harper exploits the stanza’s flexibility by giving Chloe an idiom that lends her voice folkloric authenticity. Chloe may well be speaking in public, but her audience is not the same as the antebellum white or whitedominated public to whom Harper lectured and recited her abolitionist poems, venues for which she used perfect elocutionary diction. During her postbellum southern tours, Harper’s auditors were often racially mixed; but as an educated Yankee she faced suspicion from southern black audiences as much as from southern whites.7 Her crafting of Chloe’s voice and story implies a deliberate choice to align herself with the regional idiom of southern black communities. Chloe slows the temporal movement of her account to focus closely on key events (news of the firing on Fort Sumter), to give specific examples of a general situation (how white politicians bought black men’s votes and how the women reacted), to expand on her views of what is at stake in the new circumstances of citizenship (“Aunt Chloe’s Politics”), and to compare antebellum and postbellum circumstances (“Learning to Read”). In the end, however, chronological progression produces a cycle of return with the restoration of Chloe’s sons. Emancipation, the difficulties that attend political freedom, access to education, and the construction of a community center are all interim events, Harper suggests, rather than ends. “Aunt” Chloe’s role as a mother who is forcibly denied her biological familial identity runs as an undercurrent throughout the cycle, suppressed and alienated from the historical progressions she records. In Piatt’s “A Child’s Party,” the nurse’s biological relationships remain suppressed as the white speaker clings to the nurse’s surrogate motherhood beyond earthly life. Chloe’s representative story ends with the restoration of her kinship ties, a reconciliation of the personal and the historical that will begin the cycle of progress anew. Chloe anticipates having her extended family together as a messianic event, telling Jakey that once Benny’s family arrives, “like good

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old Simeon, / I hope to die in peace.”8 Cyclical return thus sets up the possibility of a continued progression of deliverance from the enslaved past with future generations carrying on where Chloe’s generation leaves off. The sale of Chloe’s children is clearly the central trauma of “Aunt Chloe,” recapitulating the event that Harper dramatized for antebellum audiences in “The Slave Mother” and contrasting to the Chloe of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who actually advises her mistress to send her children out for hire. Nothing before this event is recounted, its effects tell in emotional and physical extremes, and it initiates Chloe’s subjective separation from enslavement. Chloe describes emancipation, too, as traumatic, but she passes quickly beyond its confusion. Contrary to the proslavery argument that slaves would be lost without the constraining institution, Chloe reports that enduring slavery has prepared the collective subject to cope with the difficulties of freedom: After years of pain and parting, Our chains was broke in two, And we was so mighty happy, We did’nt know what to do. But we soon got used to freedom, Though the way at first was rough; But we weathered through the tempest, For slavery made us tough. (ll. 133–40)

Harper thus complicates the temporal boundary of emancipation in part by writing beyond it. Collapsing her narrative of slavery and the war into the first poem and half of the second, Harper then crosses over the hiatus toward which abolitionism was directed and enters into the concrete problems of freedom. Harper also, however, blurs the temporal divide beforehand, by anticipating it in a way that values the spiritual agency of the slaves even as it acknowledges that their acquiring political rights depended upon agency beyond their community. The people in Chloe’s village learn of their emancipation from Yankee soldiers exactly in the middle of “The Deliverance,” in the twenty-ninth through the thirty-fourth of sixty quatrains. Before then, a series of moments foreshadows the end of slavery. Most of these moments are associated with Uncle Jacob. Named after the biblical

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founder of the chosen tribe of Israel, Jacob is a radical, healing force in contrast to his counterpart in Piatt’s poem, the conservative “Uncle Sam” Blair. And, while Jacob’s Christianity—inward rather than overtly political—may resemble Uncle Tom’s, he is no martyr. Jacob’s religious counsel helps other slaves to defer the destructive effects of despair and to transcend emotional immersion in slavery. When Chloe wastes away after the auction of her sons in the prologue, Jacob counsels her to turn to an alternate “Master,” Christ, for relief. Prayer lifts her spirits and gives her a “something,” a vague but soothing hope, not yet formed as the belief that slavery will end in the present, historical world: And a something seemed to tell me, You will see your boys again— And that hope was like a poultice Spread upon a dreadful pain. And it often seemed to whisper, Chloe, trust and never fear; You’ll get justice in the kingdom, If you do not get it here. (ll. 57–64)

The other, spiritual “Master” gives Chloe an internalized elsewhere, not a fantasy space that justifies the existing social order but a place where the law is in her interest. Harper thus construes spiritual resignation and endurance not as consent to oppression, nor even as martyrdom, but as an active, sustaining state, a ground for believing in a different future. And that future comes; Chloe and her sons reunite in this life, obviating a function that the afterlife served in sentimental constructions of slavery. In “The Deliverance,” Chloe admires the young master’s manly appearance in his Confederate uniform, but when she allows that “somehow I couldn’t help thinking / His fighting must be wrong,” her optimism about the war’s outcome begins. Uncle Jacob urges her to keep up her faith and courage, reporting to her his own inner conviction—rational and spiritual, resistant to the discipline of pain—that slavery will end: “And something reasoned right inside, Such should not always be; And you could not beat it out my head, The Spirit spoke to me.” (ll. 73–6)

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The religious practice that Jacob encourages serves the slaves as a way of forming a collective subjectivity radically separated from that of the mistress. They pray “in the cabins” for freedom while Mistus prays “in the parlor” for southern victory. Chloe reads the war news in Mistus’s facial reactions to her son’s letters from the front, translating her expression for its meaning to the slaves: I used to watch old Mistus’ face And when it looked quite long I would say to Cousin Milly, The battle’s going wrong; Not for us, but for the Rebels.— (ll. 93–7)

Inklings of the coming of freedom thus are also instances of the gradual separation of “our” point of view from that of the slaveholders until, by the passage cited above, they have become polar opposites. Singularity precedes collectivity in Chloe’s narration. No plural first-person appears in the story of the sale of her sons, and, although the master had sold Cousin Milly’s son Saul, Chloe seems to think that her own case should be exceptional. “There must be some mistake; / Where’s Mistus?” is her response to being told the news, as if the mistress would surely correct the error. “The Deliverance” introduces a first-person plural consenting to Thomas’s rule: “We all liked Mister Thomas.” But Chloe shifts to third person when referring to the way the “servants” internalized the disciplinary limits that Thomas sets for them: “He made them understand.” Although she joins in the collective compliance with kindly administered slavery, she distances herself from the group that needs to be taught subservience. Chloe’s identification with the collective first-person strengthens as she recognizes the slaves’ shared stake in the battle, and they join together to pray for an outcome opposite to the outcome that the Mistus is praying for. The first racial identification comes with the news of emancipation: “the word ran through the village, / The colored folks are free.” Reporting on the freed people’s celebratory mingling with the Union troops, Chloe expands the collective pronoun to “our people,” an ethnic identity, a group belonging: ’Twas a sight to see our people Going out, the troops to meet,

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Almost dancing to the music, And marching down the street. (ll. 129–32)

Chloe refers to “the colored folks” again when speaking of Andrew Johnson, whose name she forgets: Then we had another President,— What do you call his name? Well, if the colored folks forget him They would’nt be much to blame. (ll. 152–6)

As in Piatt’s highlighting the forgotten painter of her ancestor’s portrait, for Harper and Chloe, forgetting acts as a critical tool. Johnson is forgettable because of his failure to continue the deliverance of black people into freedom: We thought he’d be the Moses Of all the colored race; But when the Rebels pressed us hard He never showed his face. (ll. 157–60)

Raced identity thus emerges in Chloe’s story as a communal identity that replaces the abolished condition of servitude, carrying with it shared political interests. When Chloe’s “I” reemerges in “The Deliverance,” it is as a critical participant in the forming of a raced community. Deferred since the sale of her sons, the possibility of her own subjective transformation reopens when Mister Thomas leaves for the war. Chloe’s thoughts and words do not match as she reacts to this disruption of the household. She thinks the slaves may have a stake in the war, but the words she speaks to Uncle Jacob express her sympathy with Mistus, whose situation as a mother being separated from her child Chloe does not yet differentiate from her own: “How old Mistus feels the sting, For this parting with your children Is a mighty dreadful thing.” (ll. 62–4)

But successive generations of whites will not possess Chloe’s sympathy, as they do the nurse’s in “A Child’s Party.” Chloe’s attunement to Mistus’s feelings later qualifies her as an ironic decoder of war news. Her individu-

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ality asserts itself most distinctively when she expresses her political views: “If I was a man,” she claims, she would vote for Grant because he broke up the Ku Klux Klan; and she protests that, unlike the men whose follies she recounts, she would never sell her vote. This nonvoting citizen-I gives no instances of her own activism as a “woman radical” in “The Deliverance”; she apparently has had no husband to chasten. Despite her lack of direct political experience, however, she can theorize about the experiences of others, and will have her say about the connection between political honesty and uplift through education. In “Learning to Read,” Chloe’s “I” gains an interior autonomy that goes beyond the pronouncements of “Aunt Chloe’s Politics.” This feminized liberal sovereignty, religious and domestic in the absence of political rights, however, is not the endpoint of the subject’s development for Chloe. In “Church Building,” Uncle Jacob delivers his farewell message in a newly built house of worship. He will die peacefully, a free old man, not crucified by slavery like his counterpart in Stowe’s novel. He looks both old and young; embodying the transition from the old slave community’s spiritual life to the new community’s political freedom, he signifies Harper’s insistence that agency for the postwar construction of an independent black citizenry originated within the enslaved community itself. In “The Reunion,” Chloe plans to enlarge her sovereign domain to make room for her children and grandchildren. For Harper, the phases that form an individual raced subject necessarily interact with the development of collectivity, extending beyond autonomy to the reformation of community and family. In “The Deliverance,” when emancipation comes, the white slaveowners all but vanish, to be replaced by a series of white political figures sorted into friends and foes of Chloe’s collective “we.” The disappearance of Mistus and her son Mister Thomas deforms a narrative convention for sentimental war stories. The opening of “The Deliverance” suppresses the anguished subjectivity whose founding trauma Chloe had confronted in the prologue. “The Deliverance,” we are led to expect, will be about Mister Thomas: Master only left old Mistus One bright and handsome boy; But she fairly doted on him, He was her pride and joy. (ll. 1–4)

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The next stanzas establish Thomas’s attractiveness as a character: he grows up to be as likable to the slaves as he was when a child; the farm prospers, as it did not under his father’s rule. Life for the slaves is better under Mister Thomas, though he does keep them under his control. Chloe next tells of Thomas’s reading his mother the news that the Confederate army is firing on Fort Sumter and announcing his resolve to join the fight. His doting mother becomes “too full to speak,” shedding “great big tear-drops.” Standard closure of this opening plot would come with Thomas’s dying heroically or his returning home to his mother, having miraculously survived the war. Neither resolution occurs in “The Deliverance.” Chloe’s narrative gives two moments that could foreshadow conventional closure of the white war story, but instead they substitute for it. Chloe last mentions Thomas when his mother exults over a letter from him about the Confederate victory at Bull Run (ll. 85–8). Later Mistus again becomes speechless with emotion, as she did when Thomas left home, but it is because she has lost her newly emancipated “servants” rather than her son (ll. 125–8). Unlike the tragic Chloe of the prologue, this white mother appears as a comic distortion of sentiment, her selfish grief expressed in tearless histrionics. One must read well beyond emancipation for further news of Thomas. Harper saves the end of his story as an opportunity for Chloe to exult in the reversal of family fortunes that culminates her polarization against her former mistress (a separation that never happens to Stowe’s Chloe). In “The Reunion” Chloe reflects to Jakey: “I’m richer now than Mistus, Because I have got my son; And Mister Thomas he is dead, And she’s nary one.” (ll. 29–32)

She does not specify the circumstances, glorious or otherwise, of Thomas’s death. Harper thus interrupts the telling of a racially dominant story of mothers and war to interpose an ongoing counter-dominant story of separated mothers and children that began well before the war. Even as it builds its own autonomy, the raced community remains dependent on outside political agency; but universal manhood suffrage means that members of the community do have the opportunity to rally round the cause,

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And go for holding up the hands That gave us equal laws . . . (ll. 235–7)

Harper nowhere identifies these political agents as exclusively white (she was herself one of the Yankee teachers Chloe mentions in “Learning to Read”). One of Chloe’s anecdotes about vote selling, however, translates the deceptive whiteness of the male sphere of electoral politics to the domestic female sphere. Chloe explains how David Rand, “the worst fooled man I ever saw,” sells his vote for flour and sugar. When his wife invites company over and serves tea, he discovers that the sugar is mixed with sand. Harper adds an extra stanza beyond narrating the incident: The sugar looked so nice and white— It was spread some inches deep— But underneath was a lot of sand; Such sugar is mighty cheap. (ll. 209–12)

Coming near the end of a poem that began with a portrait of the “nice and white” Mister Thomas, this passage reflects back on the cheapness of a slaveowner’s kindness. At the same time, it also cautions against being taken in by “nice and white” appearances in exercising the political franchise. Both are instances of the dominant race’s using immediate comforts to distract black people from a more radical realization of their interests. The whiteness that the slaves had internalized in their admiration of Mister Thomas at the beginning of “The Deliverance” returns at the end as a corrupted consumer good that derails David Rand’s right to “hold up the hands” of agents working for racial equality. Chloe understands, as do the Sapphires in the poem, the “women radicals” who dog their husbands into voting correctly, that defining one’s citizenship in terms of economic consumption can undermine the politics of freedom: . . . freedom cost too much Of blood and pain and treasure, For them to fool away their votes For profit or for pleasure. (ll. 237–40)

This last stanza of “The Deliverance” challenges the audience to action, while it links the responsible exercise of freedom to remembering the material history of suffering that preceded access to political rights.

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Asking what it means for Chloe to retrieve the raced past across the temporal divide of emancipation raises different questions than it does for the speakers of “A Child’s Party” and Loew’s Bridge, who are readily conflated with those poems’ authors. Aunt Chloe more clearly is a persona who differs from her author. Harper was never a slave, although she witnessed slavery while growing up in antebellum Maryland. Educated until age thirteen, she began publishing her writing and delivering orations in 1854 at the age of twenty-nine, the start of a half-century career of activism for black and women’s rights. What does it mean that Harper is not Chloe, that Harper (like Gould in “The Slave Mother’s Prayer”) projected the voice of someone who lacked her own literary cultivation? The gap between author and speaker makes “Aunt Chloe” almost tract-like; Chloe’s control of her identity is an artifact of Harper’s putting into literary practice a theory of racial uplift. Toni Morrison’s discussion of Africanism, however, helps to highlight another, more integrative way that Harper’s ventriloquism works. In white-authored literary texts, according to Morrison, the representation of black idiomatic speech is a feature of “literary blackness” that establishes difference and signals modernity—the difference between speech and text, the modernity of writer and reader.9 Chloe’s voice, however, rather than reinforcing a gap between oral and literate, negotiates their interaction in relation to racial modernity. To the extent that Chloe can be said to be an Africanist figure, the “longing, terror, perplexity, shame, and magnanimity”10 that she captures move against literary whiteness—the erasure of difference in the assumption that both reader and writer are white. Chloe’s “I remember,” then, is the fiction of an activist, and Chloe herself, a fictional character, signifies remembrance: she is a trope of linkage between the past of slavery and the striven-for future of racial elevation. To the community Harper addresses in this fictive voice, Chloe’s “I remember” urges remembrance of these years of war, emancipation, and reconstruction from a viewpoint inside black collectivity—how agency developed from within and not just that it was granted from without. “I remember” also memorializes the Aunt Chloe figures: their suffering the loss of their children, their chastening men’s political practice, their acquiring literacy and making homes for the upcoming generation. Even within a marginal community constructing its own memorial center for the sake of its future, Chloe’s agency in history is in danger of being

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marginalized because of her gender. Her politics are critical support for male voters. Her familial leadership follows the death of the charismatic elder who sees the race through to the founding of the post-emancipation community, and it will end with her “dying in peace” once she has brought her sons and their families together. Chloe’s role thus is transitional between male leaders; she forges a link across a breach in paternal history, between “Uncle” Jacob and the free sons who become fathers. This breach becomes evident as, emerging from a system in which kinship titles (Uncle Jacob, Cousin Milly) everywhere mark the disruption of family ties, the community aims to make biological kinship relations a building block of racial collectivity. Memorializing Chloe’s support role, Harper affirms for freedwomen a role very much like republican motherhood, with differences: motherhood must be reconstructed following slavery’s disruption of kinship ties, and the community Chloe represents is not the politically dominant collective but one subject to currents in the majority political culture. The majority culture is split between assisting in the extension of republicanism beyond its original constitutional limits and using the armament of consumerism (for the moment of Chloe’s narration; more violent and more subtle strategies would follow) to press against the extension of republican practice to former slaves. Chloe’s remembering, then, is reconstructed from the post-emancipation viewpoint of activism continuing beyond abolition to racial uplift. There is no nostalgia for an idyllic past in Chloe’s story; to the extent that Chloe presents Thomas’s governance of the plantation as an idyllic time, she quickly ironizes it. Her anticipated enjoyment of a whole family in her old age projects the blissful idyll into a still unrealized future. As was so frequently the case with abolitionist poetics, Chloe’s story “forgets” how she became a mother and who the father of her sons was. Although the sequence on voting features couples, Chloe mentions no partner of her own. Her being alone works to highlight her role as an indigenous theorist, a liberal thinker whose views are rooted broadly in her developing community’s preliterate life. That her sons are sold just after the master dies may suggest he fathered them, but Harper may have wanted to avoid dealing with miscegenation as an obstacle to the formation of a kinship-based racial community. The narrative of “Aunt Chloe” as a whole moves toward unmin-

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gling blackness from whiteness, toward naturalizing through racial kinship a material basis for politicizing everyday life. If the events memorialized in Chloe’s speech belong to present and future African American communities, however, Harper used the medium of print also to distribute them to white readers, albeit at a much greater distance than the audiences she drew into witnessing the events in “The Slave Mother.” The prologue to “Aunt Chloe” would have reminded former abolitionists of the passion they invested in ending a system that tore children from their mothers. Harper’s account of Chloe’s emotional separation from her mistress also seems to speak directly to former abolitionists, educating them not to expect sympathy to suffice for their post-emancipation roles in racial justice. The story of the white mother and her soldier son in “The Deliverance” would have reached out more broadly to readers of popular war fiction, demanding that they turn away from the pathos of disrupted white private lives and toward the meaning of emancipation for a black family (a gesture that could stand constant repeating today, when the Civil War flourishes as a popular culture industry). With Chloe’s idiomatic speech, too, Harper responds to the representation of slaves and slave speech in the white popular genres that Uncle Tom’s Cabin catalyzed, in which pro- and antislavery writers proliferated competing stereotypes, laying groundwork for the plantation tradition.11 Speaking through Chloe about Reconstruction politics, Harper spells out how white politicians can legitimately earn the black male vote while warning them that black women will not let men succumb to racist coercion. Finally, through Chloe, Harper conveys to the distanced white audience and to educated black readers the urgent need of the newly freed communities for educators, as well as the dangers that they face.12 Through these cues, Harper guides white readers into very specific roles around the periphery of the forming black race, whose uplift at this stage is to occur, as much as possible, through self-help. Beyond what happened before Chloe’s “I” emerged from the trauma of losing kinship, what is in danger of being forgotten in a teleological telling of history is the ragged edges around true chronological progression. “The Reunion” loops back to the prologue with such satisfactory justice that the beginning and the end of Chloe’s story are embedded within one another; the journey between is long and complex, but Chloe has full narrative con-

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trol of the contours of her identity. What if Chloe had not lived to see freedom or to become reunited with her sons? What if the merciful forgetting of pain permitted by Uncle Jacob’s faith had not proved a harbinger of earthly justice and reunion? Hope justified by time is valuable in retrospect; what if time proves it false? What of those who did not sustain a program of subjective progress such as Chloe’s—those whose stories would be unrepresentative of racial uplift as Harper conceived it? With the men “fooled” out of their votes, Harper begins to sketch out a racial stratification that is pronounced in Iola Leroy. Aunt Linda, herself one-down in quality to the educated mulatto characters, calls the vote-selling men “niggers,” contributing to the stratification, a cultural role that Sapphire serves in the white imaginary of plantation mythology. “Aunt Chloe” ends with the picture of an ideal segregated community; white racism is at bay, white assistance is adequate and unobtrusive, income is enough to add on to cabins and support a church. As further chronology would manifest, this community remained vulnerable to outside forces. Yet within the poem cycle, for the moment of Chloe’s utterance, her community has a fragile self-containment that is analogous to the autonomy of lyric poetry. The correspondence between Chloe’s story and the genre in which Harper told it becomes especially prominent when one compares it to Aunt Linda’s similar story: in poetry a single witnessing voice to a collective experience, in fiction a character among other characters subordinated to a narrative about the labors of an African American elite on behalf of a diverse, divided race. The structure Chloe’s story gives to poetic autonomy works, however, in ways almost directly antithetical to the grieving lyricism that characterizes Piatt’s poems as well as to the elite aesthetic of white literary modernity. Chloe’s autonomy is the product not of alienation but of multiple stages of recovery from alienation. Her story begins with a crisis that signifies the vulnerability of her raced and gendered body to the disciplinary action of slavery; her suffering when her children are sold tells her who she is in the arrangement of power. But the story then moves critically through a disengagement of sentimental, domestic bonds to end with Chloe’s ownership of and creativity in private space. The poem cycle departs from poetic autonomy in asserting the historical specificity of American slavery, but in another way it affirms poetic autonomy as an effect of the historical wishes and struggles to which it gives form. For the

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historical consciousness represented by Chloe’s voice, the self-sufficiency of a literary act (such as reciting the story in “The Deliverance”) emerges from and depends upon the historical material it shapes and transmits. Shaping poetic autonomy around a black maternal figure as a historical subject rather than as an object of nostalgia, Harper extends the strategies of abolitionism in a way that reflects critically on Piatt’s celebration of her nurse’s kindness. The prologue to “Aunt Chloe” recapitulates abolitionist poetics, showing a despairing mother and her resignation in hopes of future justice. Harper does not dwell on issues of labor and leisure or physical appearance; instead, the dialectical construction of black and white womanhood hinges on maternal affect. With Chloe’s story, she complicates Piatt’s picture of cross-racial intimacy within slavery by releasing Chloe from sympathy toward a white woman who has also lost a child: for the slave woman, political agency comes not through feeling cross-racial sympathy but through liberating herself from it, recognizing the contingencies that differentiate her grief from her mistress’s. Chloe would never again call a white child “my child,” as the nurse does in Piatt’s poem. Racial difference, the separation of collective black identity from white slaveholders’ interests, emerges in Chloe’s story as progress toward freedom. Further, in contrast to Piatt and in opposition to the absence of representations of a raced society in Gould’s poems, Harper’s “Aunt Chloe” moves toward the development of post-emancipation black citizenship. White male dominance recedes into the background of Chloe’s story, from the death of a white patriarch in the prologue to the omission of white people altogether as Chloe focuses on the black community in the last two poems of the cycle. Chloe and the women of her community take up the mission of white women’s culture in that they have a political charge complementary to male electoral politics. Their support role, however, is not essentialized along gender lines, as it was in conservative women’s republicanism, but imposed by the granting of the franchise to men only; Chloe imagines what kind of voter she would be, a basis for her critical theorizing about how the franchise should be exercised. Harper answers the antebellum concern with and evasion of disrupted and untraceable kinship relations by making the disentanglement of the slaves’ familial affect from that of the slaveholders the starting point of liberation, and the reconciliation of black families the closure toward which Chloe’s story moves.

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There is a change of venue between Harper’s own abolitionist verse and “Aunt Chloe.” In her antebellum public speaking, Harper addressed largely white audiences where standard English mattered; in the poem cycle, Chloe’s idiomatic speech helps to define the hopes and struggles she shares with a community that has only begun to add literacy to its means of communication. Through Chloe’s voice and the voices she incorporates in her story, particularly that of Uncle Jacob, Harper gives political weight to oral communication; but, in contrast to Piatt, she introduces reading as a crucial component of individual and collective development rather than a disruptive aberration. Just as emancipation does not cataclysmically translate Chloe’s community from total bondage to full liberty, so it does not mark a hard divide between a preliterate folk culture and one in which literacy is the norm. Some slaves do read, and the skillful “reading” of nontextual cues about the war news is part of the slaves’ formation as free subjects. Harper’s writing the folk voice of a now free and literate Chloe pays tribute to the legacy of oral transmission while transforming it for print. In this way Harper’s take on the relationship between print and speaking resembles that of abolitionist-style republicanism—the two media complement one another—except that Harper places great emphasis on the inherent importance of writing, promoting the building of a print culture specific to African Americans.13 Harper introduces no protective screens for her female speaker and, despite the possibility that Chloe’s motherhood resulted from sexual exploitation, there is no note of female fallenness in “Aunt Chloe.” The political charge in Harper’s poetics thus moves past the abolitionist exploitation of sympathy for defenseless, suffering others. Women’s engagement in public affairs makes them “women radicals” who sway elections, not tainted objects of pathos. It is male voters, not women, who are seduced in the public sphere; further, it is a corrupt white polis, not Sapphire, that degrades and emasculates black male citizens. While the cycle as a whole moves toward the defining of black racial collectivity, genre and content cues in individual poems address the possibility of a mixed-race readership. In the prologue Chloe retells a story that white abolitionists often heard, the story of a mother’s loss of her children; in “The Deliverance” she opens with a white-centered domestic war story. From this point on, her story immerses itself yet more deeply in concerns specific to a black audience. A white reader seeking herself in the later po-

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ems will see that teachers are needed, and that time vindicates Chloe’s having freed herself from her cross-racial sympathy for another grieving mother. The autonomy of Chloe’s lyric world depends upon her taking control of and delimiting literary whiteness.

7 What One Is Not Was Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert’s Poetics of Self-Reconstruction M a ry E l i z a Tu c k e r L a m b e rt’s Loew’s Bridge: A Broadway Idyl (1867) is a long poem of observations, associations, and musings about the view from a pedestrian overpass that spanned the traffic-clogged intersection of Broadway and Fulton Street in New York City for just over one year of the 1860s. Completed April 15, 1867, the bridge was intended to relieve traffic so heavy that it endangered life and limb, but on July 21, 1868, the Proceedings of the Board of Aldermen recorded that the Supreme Court had declared it “a failure as a public convenience” and “a serious obstacle to the free and uninterrupted uses of the streets.”1 Loew’s Bridge is the earliest and, at 720 lines, by far the longest of the three postbellum poems I consider in this book. It differs from Sarah Piatt’s “A Child’s Party” and Frances Harper’s “Aunt Chloe” in being nonnarrative and, in places, antinarrative, in that it introduces narrative elements only to leave them abruptly behind. While both Piatt and Harper use regular quatrains, Lambert’s prosody is improvisational; she intersperses blocks of iambic pentameter with shorter lines and sections that break into irregular lyric stanzas. Some of Lambert’s language rings of conventional sentimentality in a way that numbs the minds of readers schooled in modernist poetics—a recurrent obstacle in the recovery of much noncanonical nineteenth-century poetry. The poem’s fissured structure can make it appear that Lambert achieved nothing other than the dogged production of length. But it is precisely this fissuring that gives the piece its complexity, inviting a serious reading that draws on strategies for approaching not only sentimentality but also satire and the modern long poem, an aggregation of moments whose cohesion is neither didactic nor narrative nor affective. Biographical uncertainties have haunted the recuperation of Lambert’s poetry. Loew’s Bridge, originally published anonymously, and Poems (also

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1867) by Mary Eliza Perine Tucker (not yet Lambert) were reprinted through the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers; they are in the first of four volumes of Collected Black Women’s Poetry (1988).2 Both books have also been included in the Database of African American Poetry 1760–1900,3 an electronic archive sold on compact disk and accessible through research library sites on the World Wide Web. The incorporation of these works into African American literary projects has been based largely on a reference to a Mrs. M. E. Lambert in Mrs. N. F. Mossell’s The Work of the Afro-American Woman (1894). 4 Mossell was in fact referring to Mollie E. Lambert, an African American woman born in Ohio and educated in Toronto, who published in the A.M.E. Church Review and was prominent in Detroit’s racial uplift efforts during the last four decades of the century.5 The actual author of Loew’s Bridge was a white native of Alabama educated in New York who returned north to sell her poems and seek work as a journalist after the Civil War impoverished her father, Edward M. Perine, and her first husband, John M. Tucker. (She married her second husband, a Colonel Lambert of Philadelphia, in 1871.)6 As much because her works were classified black as because she turns out to have been two different people, reading Lambert becomes an instance when the project of opening American literary history to authentic differences clashes with the theoretical task of opposing the essentialization of race. What difference does it make to how the poem is read, or whether it is read today at all, that its author was a white Southerner? The misattribution called attention to works that may have remained overlooked; because of their implication in the slave system, white southern women authors of the nineteenth century have been little sought for recuperation. At the same time, the text’s mistaken contextualization in African American writing helps to call attention to how Lambert represents the construction of racial whiteness, a thread in her work that readers might well miss if her own whiteness were taken for granted. Many women before Lambert began literary careers when their husbands or fathers could not provide financial support, but the specifics of her situation illustrate a broader historical change in the myths and actualities shaping women’s lives. Late in the century the press would announce the ascendancy of the New Woman—strong, smart, sexual, independent, men’s match in occupational roles—over older ideals of female modesty,

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dependency, and domesticity. As it is usually accounted for, this change came about gradually over the period since midcentury, as new, individualistic roles for women opened within the male-dominated culture and economy.7 Yet for southern white women like Lambert, the material conditions demanding New Womanhood came suddenly and early. “True womanhood,” taking its most exaggerated form among upper-class whites of the antebellum South, experienced its most concentrated shock during and after the Civil War.8 Anne Firor Scott details the eruption of women’s careers—with literary careers among the foremost—that followed the war’s undermining of southern white patriarchy. Women bred to dependency and domesticity found themselves living without male family members and responsible for supporting themselves.9 In Loew’s Bridge, the New Woman pieces together a provisional new subjectivity in relationship to the postbellum urban scene. Clusters of women and children give way to cadres of male professionals, just as if the speaker were observing the passing away of sentimental domesticity as a public force and the rise of a masculinist culture of expertise. Lambert organizes nearly all agency into careers, both in the sense of rising from obscurity through accomplishment and in the sense of practicing an occupation. The subjectivity she models offers a critical overview of a range of professions, a consumers’ guide to value in expert practice. She is a world away from Aunt Chloe and from Harper’s efforts to define cross-racial roles in the uplift of post-emancipation communities. Slavery belongs to a selectively recovered past that the white female subject uses to reinforce her agency on the new scene. Yet, to reconstruct herself as a critic of modernity, she must evade race and gender even as she discloses them. Lambert’s speaker retrieves from slavery a self in which the dialectic of white and black womanhood has become synthesized into a renovated whiteness that allows her to situate herself as an unobserved observer, within rather than apart from a masculinist setting. It is a setting where a unitary ideal of the subject has become obsolete, supplanted by competition and bureaucracy; but, for all its jolts and disjunctions, Lambert’s urban modernity does not support the perception of racial difference. From her position on the bridge, the speaker surveys urban public life, organizing it as a procession of types, some alone and some in groups—innocent maidens, a poor child leading her blind grandfather (fig. 4), a ragman, a fallen woman, commercial strivers, a Union and a Confederate vet-

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eran, statesmen, the mayor and his rival, authors, an apple vender, preachers, journalists, lawyers, theater people, doctors, fashionable women, and fashion designers. The occupational groups, except for the fashion designers, are entirely male. The speaker passes judgment on each part of the procession, choosing celebrities to praise or condemn. The procession gives the impression of a common struggle to defeat anonymity through ambition, and the speaker’s response to the scene is to separate the superficial and sensational from those acts truly worthy of attention. In the midst of her account of present sights, the speaker twice drifts to retrogressive vi-

4. Loew’s Bridge overhangs the dramatic scene of a male professional (a traffic officer) rescuing a sentimental heroine from her ineffective efforts to save her blind grandfather’s life. From Loew’s Bridge, a Broadway Idyl (New York, 1867).

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sions of the South where she captures symbols of value—cotton and an iconic representation of herself—which serve as reference points for her critique of the postbellum North. Postscripted to the poem is a song to the old year, which asserts optimism as an afterthought—a symptom of anxiety about the competitive scene below the bridge. Involved as she is in valuation, the speaker is critically aware of the difficulties surrounding both religious and legal judgment. Announcing a descent from romance to realism before introducing the fallen woman (fig. 5)—the very type of urban anonymity in that a male acquaintance refuses to acknowledge her—Lambert asks: . . . Say, is there real guilt on earth? And shall we all be judged By sins—not weakness? God forbid! (ll. 119–22)

Loew’s Bridge is satire, but satire whose critical strategies are alloyed with sentimentality. Like Alexander Pope or Samuel Johnson, Lambert enfranchises herself to judge morals and manners, behavior and thought, assuming the satirist’s obligation to expose human error in a hodgepodge of social and private matters and to affirm, for the social good, a base of values that will outlast present fashion. The legal profession cannot be trusted to manage questions of guilt. Lawyers, without exception, are snakes because their “science” subordinates right, justice, and mercy to a battle for power that the strongest mind wins. The poem ends with an imagined historical pageant in which the “last Surrogate,” a judicial officer responsible for settling estates, declares the “WILL” broken. “Will” is a pun here, linked to the bureaucratization of value and judgment; Lambert sees the collapse of a metaphysical dimension of identity that combines inherited property, rights, and status with individualistic volition.10 Some of Lambert’s passages sound mock-heroic, particularly when a block of heroic couplets— a prosodic backbone that Lambert bends more than sustains—attacks themes that the eighteenth-century British satirists also addressed, such as money’s capacity to proliferate commodities and distort the social order: ’Tis marvellous how mortals can invent The ways and means to increase worldly stores. Scorn not beginnings, and each small thing prize,

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5. The fallen woman spurned by a man on Loew’s Bridge leaves the scene, headed for an unknown fate at the harbor.

From e’en a cord, sometimes large fortunes rise. Yon apple-woman, vender of small wares, Stale lozenges, fruit, candy, and vile cakes, Who sells to urchins pennies’ worth of aches, Has now the gold safe hoarded in the bank, With which to buy high place in fashion’s rank. Merit is nothing, money rules the day Right royally, with rare despotic sway. (ll. 286–96)

The most sustained mock-heroic tone—though not form—occurs in the final sequence, where Lambert leaves the present to describe the ghost-

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ly historical pageant that someone with “second sight” would see on the spot. Following “the red man” and a hymn-singing theocracy comes the scene with the surrogate (fig. 6). “Men robed in later styles” search everywhere for “some trace of the WILL they left behind” (ll. 673, 679). While orphans and widows wait for his verdict, the surrogate tears the will, “declares ’tis Law’s command,” and everyone vanishes, except a clerk who is left to write until the last judgment—“until earth’s pall of night / Is changed for robes of glorious light” (ll. 692, 695–6). Law derogates a legacy of volition, which is replaced by lonesome, bureaucratic writing. This is a romantic and modern theme, not a neoclassical one. Lambert emphasizes the effects of the patriarchal will’s collapse on the sphere in which women’s public culture had built its authority: women and children are left unprotected from unsentimental economic forces.11 Tensions around the roles of critical judgment on one hand and virtue and feeling on the other multiply Lambert’s strategies for authorizing herself as a critic. The neoclassical satirist promoted his license through rationalist prosody that rendered him transcendently unsituated, invisible on the scene. Lambert tries this style only intermittently. Her position on the bridge parodies the satirist’s position above the passing scene in a way that suggests being in it is as important to her authority as being above it. In the first 146 lines, she eases her way into arbitrating the public world of male occupations by first placing herself and other women in the city’s open spaces. The music of children’s voices, she says, wake “in many a heart” emotions that have been “dead” to all but God, “And over me a softness crept, / And pining for my own, I wept” (ll. 39–48). Tears of loss linking her heart to others’ hearts mark her presence as a subject, her credentials earned by her firsthand knowledge of the inner lives of women. The sentimental poetics of female literary culture provide the speaker with an opening to comment on the postbellum acceleration of masculinist commercialism and specialization. That Lambert does not stand wholly above the scene she criticizes shows in a different way in the ambitions of her project. Her poem is long, extended to book length with large type and white space, and illustrated with six full-page engravings—not a bottom-dollar production. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh, James Thomson in City of Dreadful Night, and Walt Whitman in Song of Myself, Lambert aims to adapt the epic form to the modern urban scene. The opening of Loew’s Bridge an-

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6. The sinister Last Surrogate at work, as ghosts from the past hover helplessly overhead.

nounces her literary ambitiousness—her drive for a high-art niche in the literary marketplace—while at the same time foregrounding the cognitive strategies of sentimentality. Gazing down from the bridge, she is like Dante looking into the rings of hell: For hours I stood upon THE BRIDGE, Which looms like a volcanic ridge, Above a scathing fire below. A flaming crater of burning hearts— (ll. 1–4)

Yet she understands the scene through sentiment, not detachment:

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And, as souls passed beneath my feet, As weary souls passed to and fro A knowledge came, so sad, yet sweet, Each inner life I seemed to know. Oh, heaven and earth! the sins and sorrows That scarred each heart with countless furrows! (ll. 5–10)

Her expressive presence at the scene—“And pining for my own, I wept” (l. 48)—hints at a personal history, but she withholds details, substituting the outside view of the city for the inside view of herself that a reader of sentimental genres might expect to follow such an opening. Further, her tears mark the poem’s turn from grief over the loss of intimate relationships to preoccupation with haphazard encounters among people, amid which the bonds of kinship appear only in crisis or as traces of the past. Replacing a narrative of the subject’s affective and domestic life, the procession serves as a collection of other-selves, a spectacle of anxieties that she does not transcend, though she does view them critically. The subject herself is readable only as a projected set of fissures, someone with secrets that cannot be told. Lambert’s temporal strategies contribute to the sense of a subject striving to transcend a highly specified present while clinging to a few signs of her own specificity, emptied of narrative content. The poem is set in a specific time and place, a commercial district of New York City on a winter day soon after the Civil War. Lambert notes times of day—at mid-morning a merchant heads for Wall Street to borrow money, at 1:00 p.m. the lawyers go to lunch. Yet organized as a procession of types, the present has an abstracted, static quality, like a page of the newspapers published at this intersection of Broadway on “rags” collected by the ragman (ll. 94–102). Past and present mingle in the theme of aspiration and achievement or defeat; though claiming to have broken free of the Platonic vision of “forms alone,” the speaker sees the “lives of men” through a Horatio Alger–like rags-to-riches typology (Alger’s popular Ragged Dick series began the same year that Loew’s Bridge was published): And step by step, I trace some back to when With ragged jacket, hatless head, and feet Frozen and bare, they wandered in the street,

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With hope, ambition, faith within their hearts, Whose dirty faces bore the stamp of MAN. (ll. 223–7)

There is no sense of future, however, until the song that follows the vision of the last surrogate anticipates the new year. Having established her position on the bridge, the speaker shifts her perspective by using memory to situate herself much farther from the scene, in the antebellum South, a gesture that makes her a newcomer—someone not of the scene who nevertheless demonstrates a sophisticated grasp of it. Loew’s Bridge was published anonymously, and the speaker does not specify that she is female even in the opening tableau of female public culture, which she abandons after wondering if the fallen woman is saved or condemned to a mental hell and a “tainted name” (l. 146). Even sympathy—the juice of sentimental poetics—retreats, compromised in the next vignette by offhanded marveling about a pathetic figure turned entertainer: This world is strange, ’tis an anomaly! For glancing downward now I see A one-armed soldier, in a coat of blue— And, by-the-by, his legs are missing too, Grinding with his one hand the “Dixie” song. (ll. 177–81)

Only in a flashback to the antebellum South (ll. 443–62) are we shown the speaker’s gender, as if it were irrelevant to her presence as an urban observer but cannot be excluded from the poem, and as if travel to the past is done to retrieve her womanhood from a place where it mattered. This journey to her origins raises problems of how value was measured before and after emancipation. The speaker first marks this temporal divide with a rhetorical inversion that emphasizes the “free” Confederacy’s subjection to the Union: Cotton and slaves, ’twas thus we counted gold, The slaves are free, the free in bondage sold . . . (ll. 314–5; figure 7)

Later language spells out what was wrong with the antebellum system of value: Well, times have changed, the galling chain That made the black man bow

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7. “Cotton and slaves, ’twas thus we counted gold. . . .”

Subservient to a master’s mighty will, Is broken for Eternity; And with that chain the cord that bound Our Southern souls in idleness to earth, Wealth earned by others, strown with lavish hand, With but one power, the power to command, Is loosed, And on Ambition’s wings our eager soul Can reach the mount, Ambition’s much-prized goal, And grasping to our hearts the spectre Fame, We faint to find the goddess but a name. (ll. 421–33)

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The “black man” was chained, but the economic system that situated value in cotton and enslaved labor also placed the ruling class in bondage to ambitionless leisure. Released to compete like the people passing under Loew’s Bridge, Southerners are free to discover that fame, the value motivating ambition, has no substance. Lambert responds to emancipation here by saying that, bad as slavery was for both black and white, the victorious northern system of individualistic striving has proven a flawed alternative. Racial blackness appears in the poem only in the South and only in one other passage besides the one just cited: there are black children in the scene where Lambert retrieves a representation of her southern past. The language of racial whiteness, however, appears in contexts that show traces of the racial system. Maidens with “soft golden hair” (l. 19) in the opening scene are sexually pure but marred by vanity, “the sin of wealth” (l. 21). Lambert sees in these young girls a corruption similar to the selfishness that Chandler predicted and that Piatt traced in “A Child’s Party.” A poor child with a blind grandfather is so angelic that onlookers want to buy her: Full many a childless parent would bestow Gold, yellow glittering gold, could that fair child With her pure face, by art’s hand undefiled, Have been her very own. But Nature sells not . . . (ll. 65–9)

Yet unlike beautiful artifacts—and unlike the slave children in abolitionist poetry—this white child is exempt from economic exchange. In Lambert’s description of the fallen woman, a light complexion constitutes a moral language: her face flushes and drains of color, changes that are less readable in dark faces, as if a nuanced sense of shame belonged only to the lightskinned. Whiteness and blackness, lightness and darkness also play as conventional moral abstractions. The original lawyer, Satan, mixed up good and evil in a way that suggests racial mixing and inversion of the racial system—a fear that anti-Reconstruction propagandists played on: he “made the white black, and the darkness light” (l. 489). Much as Blake’s “Little Black Boy” described the banishment of his racial stigma in heaven, so in Loew’s Bridge a child cured of blindness describes sight:

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. . . “Oh, mother, is this light? ’Twas black before, and, mother, now ’tis white. I see you, mother, and I see God too!” (ll. 576–8)

Different qualities of whiteness also distinguish between the South of the past and the present North. The pure, natural, organic white of the bursting cotton boll is polluted by “the slaves / Of Fashion” (ll. 305–6) rather than by the institution of slavery. Broadway, in contrast, is a harsh, “glaring white”; Lambert compares it to a stormy sea full of boats that may or may not reach land. Whiteness as Lambert’s nostalgia imagines it was a pure, natural force that leisure corrupted, while northern modernity makes whiteness a crowded scene of anonymous grim struggles to achieve and survive. The speaker’s return to her southern past is triggered by the sight of a wagonload of sewing machines passing below her on Broadway. She pictures herself spending “half my days” sewing by an open window where jasmine tinges the air (fig. 8). This passage captures a historic site in which black and white women’s labor overlapped on plantations and where New Womanhood emerged during the Civil War. Sewing was high-status labor because it could be raised to the level of a skilled art;12 while the role of plantation mistress in much domestic labor was managerial, they took part in the actual work of clothing production. Domestic models of the sewing machine appeared in elite households during the last decade before the Civil War.13 Sewing drew southern white women into the public sphere during the Civil War when Ladies’ Aid societies organized kinds of labor that in peacetime were private into public industries to support the war effort.14 The speaker of Loew’s Bridge stops her sewing oft to gaze At two bright fairies, who with sable friends Hide, like the pixies, Underneath the petals of some bright flower, Whose clear celestial hue My darlings shame, with their bright eyes of blue. (ll. 445–50)

She contrasts the coloring of her own two children to that of their “sable” playmates. The next lines, however, blur the racial typing:

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8. The Sewing Idyll. The illustrator conceals two very small black children in the sunny background.

They crown each other with the garlands fair, The “grey-beard” mingles with their silken hair Like cords of silver, with the jet and gold . . . (ll. 451–3)

Who are “they”—all of the children or only the ones with “silken” hair? Do all of the children have “silken” hair? Does the “jet” hair belong to the “sable” children, or does one of the “bright” fairies have black hair? The speaker in Loew’s Bridge does not identify her own race, but she does raise the question of her racial identity by describing her children and their playmates, as if to assert the relevance of racial identity to her project. And,

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because of miscegenation within slavery, her children’s skin color and hair texture do not answer the question of what her race is. Further, the poem does not say whether she was a free woman or a slave. Although she earlier associated herself by pronoun with the idle ruling class (l. 426), sewing is not idleness but something between leisure and hard work (it was the daily work of the “petted and indulged” slave Eliza Harris in Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Lambert’s aim in this scene is not to disclose who she was before the war—a kind of inquiry that she speaks against elsewhere: Censorious world! oh why not o’er the past Oblivion’s vail in its soft darkness cast And honor grant, for what one IS not WAS. (ll. 240–2)

The effect of the ambiguities in the southern flashback is to minimize the speaker’s recollection of the institution of slavery and her status in it. She thus lowers the profile of slavery, the critical target of the Union’s recent military and legislative action, and gains southern domesticity as a foothold from which to critique the public, capitalist North. Instead of physically representing her past self, the speaker has the children mirror and name her abstract qualities. They make an allegorical emblem of her with the language of flowers, a language that attaches virtues to colors associated with racial lightness: Soft tiny hands are resting on my brow, I too am crowned: “I would have made your wreath of white,” The eldest says, “you are so good, But, mother, sister said that you were true, And so we added all these violets blue.” (ll. 454–9)

In the next lines, the speaker animates the sewing machine, which takes partial possession of the children through its work. The partnership between subject and machine is immaculately procreative—they are “making the children” without a man. The sewing machine’s role is that of a house slave who devotes all her affect and skill to the mistress’s children: My good machine partaking of my pride Sang one sweet song; and made the stitches fine, Making the children hers as well as mine. (ll. 460–2)

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Leaving its traces in this intimate complementarity of woman and machine is the dialectical construction of black slave womanhood and white “true womanhood.” While the two black and two white children preserve the dialectic of race as a static balance, a utopian intimacy between races, the speaker claims for her own identity both labor and the metaphysics of flowers, then separates out the labor to a cheerfully helpful machine, an ideal house servant. The racial dialectic thus is replaced by an industrial pair of other-selves, human and machine; Lambert reinscribes the southern past with a partnership more representative of the northern organization of production than of antebellum southern relations between labor and leisure. The sewing idyll is the kind of retrospective scene of “fairy beatitude” that Slavoj Zizek describes as being created to replace a trauma that separates a subject from a primary object of desire.15 Elsewhere, undisclosed memories linger as a sense of loss, of the tragic rupture of human connections, which women’s culture resisted and mourned in sentimental poetics. This scene and other scenes in Loew’s Bridge gesture toward the Civil War only to raise other possible causes of trauma, personal or psychological or metaphysical. The speaker’s tears following the opening tableau of women and children testify to a grief she shares with other women, perhaps the loss of a man in the war or, given the disclosing and concealing language, sexual betrayal. The maimed Union soldier embodies the trauma of Civil War combat, but Lambert shows the sectional wounds of the war healing: the Union veteran grinds out “Dixie” on his organ, winning a handout from a gallant Confederate veteran. Music of other nations brings looks of nostalgia to the faces of passersby; everyone in the city, not just those suffering the war’s aftermath, is homesick, displaced. The statesmen are divided between sadness for “a nation’s blame,” the war’s after-affect, and pursuit of popularity, their own share in the competitive postbellum scene. In a dense, almost Byronic passage, cotton becomes a figure of sublime Romantic genius that travels like poetry among hands and hearts and thoughts, vulnerable (like the figures passing beneath the bridge) to being corrupted by the fickleness of public valuation. Here, as elsewhere, Lambert suppresses reference to the institution of slavery while referring to the leisured class’s condition of bondage: With flakes of snow bursting from bolls of green, Like some imprisoned genius scorning to be

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Confined by laws, which bind society, And breaking bonds is wafted on the breeze Of public favor, or gathered by the slaves Of Fashion, whose vile hands Pollute its purity. True, fragments now and then Are gently taken to the hearts of men— White flowers of fancy oftimes sink to rest Deep in the wells of some fair maiden’s breast: Pure in themselves, they yet become more fair By contact with the holy thoughts in there. (ll. 301–13)

Mentioning an actress who nursed soldiers during the war, again the speaker glosses war wounds to move on to vaguer suffering. Mere medicine cannot heal the mental pain of ever-ungratified ambition. Her example of such a patient is Jefferson Davis in prison—the Confederate president takes over the identity of transcendent genius: Did they not know when the immortal Davis lay Within his prison cell, That the Leach’s skill was not in drugs, Who healed and made him well? .... How could they know? formed of earth’s common clay, Of the magnetic cords which bind The thoughts of those whose natures are refined, Whose bodies are subservient to the mind. Strange, how a mortal by the power of will And genius, tho’ untutored can exalt Himself, until he will appear A being from another sphere. (ll. 550–3, 557–64)

From what has the speaker been traumatically separated? The sewing idyll points toward a biracial place of domestic industry and mother-child beatitude whose traces she still claims as her self ’s center of virtue. However, even this self-representation is fissured: it keeps secrets; it provides a static, synaesthetic icon rather than a subject. As a subject, the speaker

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springs into being while witnessing the inner lives of the “weary souls” passing under the bridge. The lines on cotton and Davis sketch a fallen ideal of subjectivity from which the speaker keeps her distance, although she endows it with high value. Despite her associating the old South with a stagnation of ambition, she inscribes both cotton and Davis as figures of transcendent will—beings that defy law and flesh. They are Romantic poetic geniuses endowed with self-individuating agency, in effect grand prototypes for the degraded self-striving activities of the procession beneath Loew’s Bridge. In the “will” of the closing vision, this elevated sense of volition is one with inheritance, both broken in the end. Writing her way beyond the framework of women’s literary culture into urban modernity, Lambert treats the Romantic figure of the isolated male genius as a desired impossibility, an abstraction whose time has passed. The old-year song is reassuring: love and hope endure, the subject can survive the destruction of the will—although faith, the third term belonging with hope and love in Pauline scripture, is missing from the song. In the sequence just before the vision of “ghosts of the past,” the speaker’s last scene in the present, she returns to female culture, now the world of fashion rather than sentiment, and makes use of her knowledge of sewing to expose the constructedness of fashionable bodies: I know, if from our “Merchant Prince” was bought The fabric rare, made in a foreign land, Upon whose very surface seems inwrought A sightless eye, a wasted, helpless hand Of some poor wretch, who e’en his senses gave To deck the garment over which we rave. (ll. 613–8)

The end of slavery may have been a good thing, but it did not end the exploitation of labor, which modernity perpetrates on an international scale. Still, the point of this passage is not to protest exploitation; the “poor wretch” whose materiality underwrites female disembodiment is of passing, pathetic interest. The point is to embellish the speaker’s credentials as a critic of modernity. Hardly an innocent, she has specular knowledge of how fashionable women piece together the power that they wield over men: Those tasty habits, costly, plain, and neat, Disclosing ’neath their folds two tiny feet,

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Snugly encased in leather-shoes thick soled, Are snares which catch the unwary heart of man; Those costly jewels, too, from “Browne and Spaulding’s” bought— Are many a lesson to the wedded taught, That Fanchon bonnet, ribbon and a flower, Speak to man’s pocket with all potent power. (ll. 619–26)

Within the existing modern scene of money, gender, and labor, the speaker knows that consumption is the source of white women’s individual agency. This ability to see through fashionable female body parts—figuratively, the illumination of the city—detaches her agency from that of the women she observes; her own agency is concentrated in epistemological sophistication amid the spectacle. Through her fissured witnessing to the postbellum public sphere, Lambert pieces together a description of something new about subjectivity that cannot yet be described. Seeing through fashion’s construction of the dematerialized white female body, she constructs a public female subjectivity out of scraps, some of them left over from a female public culture that seems in the end discredited, like the fallen woman spurned by a man in whom she places hope. The past, what one was, needs to be superceded to save the life of the fallen woman, as well as to open opportunities for a man adrift on the street to become “the founder of the name”—a destiny more glorious than being “the last scion of the great.” Indirectly identifying with both of these figures of modernity, the speaker of Loew’s Bridge also works at superseding what she “was” in slavery. Lambert anesthetizes the emotional aftermath of slavery that Piatt had dramatized in “A Child’s Party.” To current scholarly debates about whether privileged white women were victims or agents of the slave system,16 Lambert replies, “Forget what we were.” At the same time, fashion and ambition, the pitfalls of a subjectivity disengaged from the past, need to be cautioned against. The agency that Lambert’s procession enables is that of observing and making critical distinctions among types of public acts. Lambert never hails the reader directly or shows how she imagines Loew’s Bridge reaching its audience; the speaker herself poses as an exemplary reader of the city’s activities. Her evasive selfidentification as well as the guidance she offers the reader sketch the ideological contours of her audience. She is southern with strong southern loy-

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alties but not fanatical—slavery was a bad system, and certain Northerners merit praise. Among the journalists, for example, she praises Horace Greeley for his role in soothing northern rage toward the South while she scorns a newspaperman who supports the South but propagates sensationalism. Lambert doubles this opposition to spectacle in her judgment of the clergymen, contrasting the theatrical and fashionable Henry Ward Beecher unfavorably to a reverend who founded a church for “strangers,” displaced newcomers. Having guided the reader through women’s culture into the postbellum public sphere, a modern marketplace of print and oratory, she differentiates her reader from the audience of the sensationalist press and pulpit. Achievement of a position in the mainstream of urban traffic, she suggests, is best used to attend to the margins, which are everywhere. Yet they are everywhere white; racial difference has left the public scene and been absorbed into the decorative borders of white identity. The competing representations of African Americans that fueled antebellum debates over slavery have passed into anachronism, and Lambert takes up neither the Reconstruction discourse of racial uplift nor the popular caricaturization nor the scientific racism that would rage in the postbellum press. Racial modernity has changed whiteness, made it impure and harried, but for the moment that Loew’s Bridge captures, blackness is unrepresentable. While the dialectic of leisure and labor is key in her critique of both the old South and the new urban North, in contrast to Piatt, Lambert all but eliminates racial difference from the construction of femininity, retrieving her past self as a composite of disembodied virtue and domestic labor. In Lambert’s postbellum present, slavery has become a trope for subjection to addictions endemic to urban modernity (fashion, ambition, competition). Overlooking an intersection where newspapers are published, the speaker assumes a journalistic role. The antebellum tensions surrounding gender and publication have progressed to a point where the speaker’s gender is relevant to her literary production only as a trace of the past. That female agency cannot save patriarchy is exemplified in an early episode in which a young girl tries to save her blind grandfather from an oncoming coach, endangering them both. A specialist, a traffic officer, rescues them; male specialist culture has taken over the heroic roles occasioned by sensational turns of plot (ll. 80–93). Female sentimental culture provides Lambert with

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an opening into the masculinist urban scene, but her role in relation to male dominance is discriminatory rather than redemptive: no apocalypse will transform this fallen world, no sanctity transfuse it. Sentiment remains as an indicator of the value of acts directed toward the margins of a social world and as a qualification for observing and reporting on the urban scene, but Lambert disengages it from pathetic narrative, as if to translate affect itself from a familial and communal role to a role in the valuation of public acts. Similarly, Lambert gives weight to the mother-child bond only as a reference point for affect and value, reified at the margins of the masculinist urban procession. She offers children as compensation for adults’ alienation, for the urban fall from familial and communal intimacy: “Thank God for children! for they give / New life to those who would not live” (ll. 49–50). Her memorial self-representation inverts republican motherhood’s mission of creating the subjectivities of new citizens. Instead of the mother’s fashioning them, the children fashion her, or voice her selffashioning, crowning her with virtues. Through the children, she asserts her worthiness to report on city life, despite its requiring the suspect behavior of loitering in public unaccompanied for hours. Avoiding any representation of herself as a public speaker, Lambert nevertheless represents female culture as publicly exposed and immerses herself in the male public sphere. The women with whom she identifies in the opening tableau have lost their men, fallen out of the prescribed domestic arrangement. Kinlessness abounds, unconnected to slavery, in Lambert’s modernity. While for a black speaker such as Chloe the omission of a father for her children might signify forced miscegenation, for Lambert the omission releases her from the patriarchal family—she is a woman on her own,17 redeemed by Lambert’s assertion of virtues retrievable from the past. Further, woman’s fallenness in public scenes itself becomes the basis for Lambert’s tackling the complexities of urban fallenness. She asks: what should the basis of judgment be—sin or weakness, origins or achievements? Although her viewpoint is critical, she does not take positions on specific public debates (mentioning Reconstruction, for instance, only indirectly). Instead she directs her criticism toward conciliation, finding fault with both sides in the regional conflict; but national healing is not to take place strictly on northern terms. Lambert asserts a viewpoint rooted in the old South. Although her take on the South is not uncritically nostalgic,

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racial blackness appears only in her nostalgic representation of cross-racial intimacy among children. With the sewing idyll and in her brief mention of the “black man” having been freed, Lambert buries the antebellum debates over slavery. Working toward a new critique for new circumstances, she takes whiteness alone as her concern.

8 Critical Positions in Racial Modernity An Approach to Teaching

R e c u pe r at i ve scholarship presents forgotten texts in an accessible venue and introduces them into current critical discourse, opening the way for teaching and learning communities to engage freshly with moments of genre development and angles and objects of critique. Sarah Piatt’s “A Child’s Party (in Kentucky, A.D. 185_),” Frances Harper’s “The Deliverance,” and Mary Lambert’s Loew’s Bridge complicate our picture of the development of women’s poetics, modeling variant adjustments in poetry’s relationship to the changing structure of social power. Recuperative projects, however, are always both diachronic and synchronic. The search for marginalized histories begins with present concerns, with the recognition of present needs for a past different from the one made available to us by dominant cultural narratives; at the same time, resistance to the legitimation of marginalized histories is deeply embedded in present stakes. Because poems are critical texts, they not only offer ways for us to reenvision cultural moments of the past; they can also act as catalysts for exercising and extending our own range of critical viewpoints. This chapter began as a scattered set of intentions: to conclude the postbellum section of this book, to describe how each poem inflects modernity through race, to push beyond isolated readings of the text by reading them through one another, to discover not only what they tell us about their historical moment but also what they offer about how we read that moment and our own. My intentions were thus ultimately pedagogical, and in the chapter as it stands, I first offer my own discoveries, then suggest an approach to teaching these texts that, I hope, centralizes the potential of recuperative scholarship. In my readings, the three postbellum poems represent three distinct frameworks of expression and value—art, activism, and cultural criticism —with which we commonly engage in education in the humanities; I trace

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how the meanings and values that sustain each of these frameworks contest with and supplement one another. I began putting these poems into dialogue by reading Piatt and Harper through Lambert because, in capturing a moment in the growth of corporate capitalism, expertise, and the city, she comes closest of the three to representing the international and cosmopolitan face of modernity.1 Lambert’s view of modernity is thus the most recognizable within the canons of cultural criticism, and her framing of the postbellum the most familiar in American cultural history. The world these poems share is a composite of the reconstructed past and the envisioned future, existing in the aftermath of a historical trauma of which we are all still survivors. A massive horror has occurred. As long as the horror remains in “history,” people think of it as having been left behind. Few attend to how it still shapes the present, yet injustices persist, and the horror has left gaps in the current arrangement of things. The categories of identity through which the horror raged have been dismantled in such a way that, among the liberally educated, their legacies are little more than bureaucratic details. For such a world, the subject of Loew’s Bridge, a hodgepodge critic of presentness, is the legitimate spokesperson. Still, there are resisters: artists who (like Piatt) form fragile riddles out of a blend of mourning and guilt over the lost enjoyment of difference, and activists who (like Harper) insist that those categories must be renaturalized for the sake of justice. Read as a resistant text, “A Child’s Party” shows the aesthetic’s capacity for exposing the assumptions that the cultural critic protects from examination as the base of its self-authorization. In the case of Loew’s Bridge, those assumptions are the purity of the domestic past and the marginal relevance of racial difference. The cost to the aesthetic of the insights it makes available is distance from the critic’s wider world of exchange and power; yet the aesthetic bears traces of the marketplace. If we read Piatt’s and Lambert’s poems side by side, thinking of “A Child’s Party” as an account of the childhood formation of one of Lambert’s “airy fairy figures slight” (the fashionable women of the city), Piatt’s poem marks changes that occurred as women’s public culture adapted to the growth of commercial capitalism. The female role complementary to the masculinist striving that Lambert witnessed was consumption; women’s print culture bent toward consumerism, and the white female body became a mannequin of consumerism (for example, in the famous fashion plates in Godey’s Ladys’ Book). The

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abundant family heirlooms that Piatt catalogs are remote from commodity status, hoarded rather than up for exchange, but they are more or less the aristocratic real thing to which consumerist kitsch aspires. Piatt herself ironizes even their authenticity. Similarly, Piatt engages in a critical dismantling and regressing of a white female body that is the aristocratic precursor to the fashionable figures of Lambert’s city, exposing, stage by stage until she is in full floral drag, her construction and how it depends upon and looks to the slave community. Piatt’s story works as a version of the romantic narrative through which a bourgeois subject claims the right to social dominance: “my blood was blue,” she claims—I am the lost child of aristocrats. Yet Piatt also undermines this claim, repudiating her aristocratic legacy in favor of her bond with her enslaved foster mother. Evoking a present that is all lack beyond the storyteller and the child-audience, Piatt also repudiates the role of complementing masculinist commerce. She forms an autonomous aesthetic space out of a maternal linguistic role, and out of the excess of affect and meaning beyond what the child is capable of consuming. This excess, compacted into irony and ambiguity, in itself becomes an expertise: the expertise of a modernized poetics. The children’s undercutting the value of inherited markers of status situates their party in modernity: naively and momentarily, the children do as Lambert’s “last Surrogate” does—they disrupt a legacy. If the catalog of family possessions represents the disrupted symbolic framework, in the end the nurse stands as the single signifier of the white family’s wealth and status, the real plenitude of the past once false abundance has been exposed. In this respect, Piatt’s creation of the nurse icon is a founding stroke of the modern, a moment in the formation of the female poetics of modernity. To expand this point, it is a white female modernist gesture to aestheticize “black woman,” to make her sublime, in compensation for losses associated with the domestic relations between black and white women that result from contradictions and changes in the official status of race. “Mammy carries us” is how Nell Painter summarizes the need expressed in white women’s iconization of the strong black woman, such as white suffragists’ representations of Sojourner Truth.2 The “airy fairy” construction of white womanhood implied dependency and, in crisis, the need for a deliverer; the icon of the strong, nurturing black woman thus furnished white women with an alternative to dependency on white men, burdening black womanhood with serving as a mediating term between white wom-

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anhood and the disciplinary structures of the white masculinist social order. Kevin Gaines adds evasion of white responsibility for forced miscegenation to the symbolic uses of the mammy stereotype in postbellum popular culture: it “not only stirred fond memories of plantation life, it provided whites with a forgiving image of maternal black womanhood that released them from a guilty awareness of black women as victims of rape by white men.”3 He cites a 1901 memoir by Virginia B. Sherrard: “I have always felt the joy of heaven would be incomplete were my dear old Mammy’s face absent from the group that came to welcome me”—words that Piatt herself might have written were she less engaged in complexities of sentiment, language, and memory. Does Piatt’s not using the word “mammy” signify against racist stereotyping, or is her choice a matter of nominalism, gentility, a way of distancing herself from the popular? If the aesthetic exposes assumptions that the critical protects, the subversive potential of its play with the systemic structures of identity comes to a halt when it mystifies the black female body as a sign that protects play, a nostalgic refuge from the intersecting disciplines of gender and race. With Aunt Chloe’s story, Harper offers a way of demystifying the black female body while re-collecting black lives and re-centering the history that these poems together tell on the integrity of a black woman’s knowledge and action. Chloe’s modernity takes definition in resistance to both Piatt’s and Lambert’s. Harper chronicles efforts to realize the “new birth of a nation,” not a return to republican ideals as they were framed at the nation’s founding but a different beginning, a struggle to undo the production and erasure of others in the language of liberty and rights—the same struggle that informs contemporary projects devoted to redefining American cultural history.4 Both white poets associate the fullness of the past with crossracial intimacy within slavery; Harper celebrates the loss of cross-racial intimacy and the structures of authority surrounding it, repeatedly differentiating the political valences of grief along a slave-mistress, black-white axis. For Chloe, the state of enslavement is a condition of loss; it is the trauma. Her modernity holds the hope of restoration. Harper offers no memorial substitute for Chloe’s lost children, returning the real thing as part of the making of plenitude for the future, for which faith and authority originating within the slave community have already prepared a structure. Piatt resists the consumerism of a world like Lambert’s but naturalizes consumption in the form of the nurse’s caretaking; Harper politicizes both

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economic consumerism and nurture along racial lines. By the end of the cycle, however, Harper finds respite for Chloe by redomesticating her in a small, vulnerable world. Consumerism occurs in “Aunt Chloe” as a lure away from participation in the electoral system, a temptation to mistake a substituted plenty for agency in the symbolic order. In Lambert’s world, participation in the economies of goods, services, and ideas defines individuals’ public roles; in Harper’s world, the catalog of goods that black men accept in exchange for their votes registers the presence of commercial capitalism and the forming gap between economic and political citizenship. This breach would widen in the coming decades as uplift leaders, reacting against Reconstruction-era corruption and rising white-supremacist violence, turned away from the struggle for political participation and toward economic self-help. With the thrift of those who fund the church, the queenly autonomy of the reading subject (Chloe, too, is an aristocrat), and the emphasis on family as a social building block, Harper records the beginnings of the inward turn that, according to Gaines, helped build African American middle-class ideology.5 The building of resistant practices and institutions within racial modernity begins with the slaves’ freeing themselves from the internalized monitoring of their owners; in freedom, these practices formalize partially along gendered lines with the women monitoring the political practices of men. The difference between Chloe and Harper, however, suggests that Chloe is the object of Harper’s gaze—that, even as she promotes Chloe’s local, folk expertise, Harper is monitoring her social activities and “intimacies of self ” to assure that her story is exemplary.6 Chloe’s story ends with the dream of a collective black consciousness free of the doubleness that W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about in The Souls of Black Folk:7 there is no white monitoring of the black community, no need to fill half the collective mind with the dominant race’s degradations of “who we are.” Within the genre limitations of verse, Harper thus imagines for Chloe an escape from the processes of white modernity into the enclosure of an enlarged rural home; even the activist’s poem moves toward a kind of autonomous construction, rich in affect. In recasting Chloe as Linda for Iola Leroy, however, Harper again exposes her to the white gaze, taking part in a pattern Gaines describes of the absorption of minstrelsy stereotypes into uplift discourse: “black opinion makers occasionally embraced minstrel representations stressing culturally backward, or morally suspect blacks as

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evidence of their own class superiority.”8 Harper avoids degrading Linda despite embellishing her with features of the popular-culture mammy stereotype, but Linda does stand at a rank below Iola and the other educated intellectuals and above other characters in the novel. Through Linda, Harper seems to say of her folk heroine, “This is as far as uplift can go as long as it remains rooted in the experience of slavery.” And, given the scope and force of the world beyond Chloe’s enlarged cabin, the point would have been difficult to avoid. Addressing double consciousness at length in her serialized fiction and particularly in Iola Leroy, Harper would also recuperate the strategy of rousing white sympathy; Du Bois too, forty years after emancipation, would call for “a union of intelligence and sympathy across the colorline.”9 Many of Harper’s readers would have construed her representations of character types in Iola Leroy not as stereotypical products of the white gaze but as skillful and realistic representations.10 Its heroine could be regarded as a model for the mixed-race elite whose privileges in the racial system placed seemingly impassable barriers between them and the most oppressed of slavery’s survivors. For the white monitoring gaze, however, Harper embodies in the character of Iola a renewed appeal for identification with those across the line, showing her subject to injustice and asking: “Imagine she is white.” As it is in John Grisham’s A Time to Kill,11 this strategy is disturbingly rooted in the realities of racism, catering to a white incapacity to feel violence inflicted on the body of the other. And, as in the era of slavery, in Kentucky, 185_, the traps of racial dominance undercut the politics of sympathy. For the white gaze of cosmopolitan modernity, Chloe’s world simply does not exist in the present. As a female and American counterpart to Baudelaire’s poet-on-the-street, Lambert’s narrator makes conspicuous the marginalization of gender and race as critical categories in postbellum modernity. But she too—in ways far different from Chloe—is shaping a self in the aftermath of historical disruption. Cultural critics today will recognize their area of expertise not only in Lambert’s take on the modern but also in her complications of subject position. She doubles her stance of invisible observer with cues to her situatedness, much as critics today put forward aspects of their own identity commitments to reveal how their viewpoints are interested, to counter the rationalist tradition of a transcendent “view from nowhere.” Late modernity reorganizes space and time in such a

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way that identity and experience become disengaged from the local, sequestered in abstract systems of expertise,12 much in the way that Lambert envisions the urban marketplace below her. She counters this abstraction by rooting her viewpoint in the local. While modern expertise culture tends to disengage knowledge from morality, Lambert’s judgments of expert practice are moral; she resembles those contemporary cultural critics who reinstate ethics in critical discourse. Despite its masculinism, Lambert’s world is one where the authority of phallic patriarchalism is subject to erosion and deconstruction; and, like a postmodernist, Lambert offers her own hybrid and fissured self-fashioning as a replacement for what has been lost. Lambert’s doubling of transcendence and situatedness, when set within her cultural-historical moment, reconstructs links from the female poetics of modernity to its antecedents. Locating her self-accounting in a past domestic space and having children reflect back to her an idealized self, she marks her engagement with residues of women’s culture as it formed earlier in the century. Her stance resembles a feminism whose critical categories derive from traditions of women’s experience within a patriarchal order. A double stance also occurs in the speaker’s present, at the intersection of Broadway and Fulton. Architecturally, Loew’s Bridge enabled perception that is both participatory and observational, giving people hurrying from one place to another access to an overview. The bridge thus disengaged the opportunity to see things from above from the privilege of leisure. Similarly, Lambert negates the implication of leisure in the southern past, condensing the real that lies across the temporal divide of traumatic loss into a working idyll. She and her sewing machine, together a composite of technology and retrograde womanhood, emerge as the signifier that is to repair the loss. Object of the gaze of children who read her meaning, the iconic self repairs her visibility as well as her virtue—attributes that neither disembodied expert nor public woman can take for granted. The parade of city figures, too, becomes a site of loss as the subject on the bridge reproduces their metonymic excess, registering the elusiveness of visibility and virtue by searching out the features of mere fame-seeking as opposed to those of “good and true” action. The bridge as a sign of trauma—of a dangerous gap between one site and another site—doubles the sense that it is the subject herself who is to fill the “hole in the real.”13 The “crater” under Loew’s

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Bridge was not there until the bridge was built, and the view into the crater is the subject’s point of origin; the speaker gives voice to the gaze of late modernity as she monitors intimate expressions and organized social activity. The urban scene offers the speaker opportunities to heighten her awareness of her place, as a woman who makes, in global exchange and power, and thus enables cultural criticism and produces its subject—someone quite different from the domestic lyricist of Lambert’s Poems, which she wrote when she lived in the floral domesticity that the idyll in Loew’s Bridge commemorates. The interplay among Piatt’s, Harper’s, and Lambert’s positions, then, suggests limitations and extensions for each. Harper’s work richly critiques the historical basis of Piatt’s and Lambert’s perspectives on race, but, embedded as it is in history, Harper’s work too offers only a provisional program for undoing the racialized wrongs of slavery. The overarching link between race and time in American culture may be that “race” as a problem, a category embroiled in historical horror, cannot at any one stage be “solved” once and for all. When progress is made, it is contingent on the form that the horror has been taking (slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, the burning of churches); but difference has not been expunged, and its enjoyment may be malignant or benign. For cultural criticism today, does the deconstruction of the category “race” hold out a hope, similar to that of abolitionism, of being an ethical political enterprise whose achievement should bring an end to the time of historical horrors surrounding race? Does each act of deconstruction—or each micro-legislation of equal citizenship regardless of difference—leave a surplus of racialism that disappoints the enterprise? There are critical and pedagogical dangers in these questions: among them the danger of framing structures of inequality as something about which ultimately nothing can be done. But these three poems have more to offer than the disappointment of limitations. Each poem offers moments when its subject sees beyond the common sense appropriate to her identity and recognizes the workings of the systems that shape her. Piatt’s speaker recognizes her own whiteness as a constructed racial category; she sees her own objecthood and the subjecthood of the other. Lambert retrieves an image of herself as a maker, a participant in the industrial world—a basis for assuming authority as a critic of internationalist modernity. But it is Harper whose representation of the poems’ shared world most explicitly

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features a movement to transform it. Harper projects for Chloe a progressive radicalism, beginning with separating her own interiority from the subjective structures that bolster the system that oppresses her, the “eureka” critical education today theorizes as the beginning of liberation. Paolo Freire might have been speaking of Chloe when he wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.15

That Harper maps Chloe’s learning in a series of strategic responses to contingencies makes her conception of the formation of active subjects adaptable to new circumstances and fresh insights. In abducting Harper’s map into the present, however, or adapting Freire’s model for classrooms in the United States, we must recognize the differences that times, places, and identities make. The nature of the system from which selves separate out their own struggles and desires must be articulated anew, as must the values and collectivities that define self-interest and support historical agency. An American college course might be multiracial; in most state and private institutions, the class will usually be predominantly white unless it is a course in ethnic studies. To inflect these issues through racial identity has very different implications for whiteness than it has for color, and, in addressing race, a crucial part of the educator’s task will be guiding the students toward a recognition of what whiteness has to do with race. A white subject cannot radicalize herself by committing to a black identity, as Iola Leroy did, and as the author of Loew’s Bridge, if she had indeed been a passing mulatta, would have done in writing for the A.M.E. Church Review. A white subject can also not radicalize herself by denying the relevance of race and, in recognizing the racial system’s cost to her—the awareness Piatt captures—she only begins to “emerge from” and “turn upon” the system of oppression that makes her white. But Piatt’s strategy does have a place in extending Harper’s pedagogical map. While Piatt falls short of representing effective agency for change, suppose that the party-ers in her poem are simply stuck for a time in a pervasive mesh of hierarchical racial difference. Through the party’s miming of cultural subversion, Piatt offers the possibility that cross-racial players can collaborate in imaginative dismantlings

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of the apparatus of racial hierarchy in ways that open up the prospects for actual change. • • • •

The approach to teaching these texts that I suggest here depends upon play. It assumes that moments in cultural history are best characterized not by allowing one viewpoint to rise to the top but through the interaction among multiple viewpoints. This chapter so far has recorded what I discovered by putting these poems into dialogue with one another, but I would expect widely differing dialogues to emerge in different classroom settings. Students will be invited to engage in the recovery of a moment in the past. The object is not to determine how things were—not to describe “a closed world from which there is no exit”16—but to discover and play with the structure of this world. The members of a class first describe the world that Piatt, Harper, and Lambert shared, then identify how each poet occupies and resists this world, and finally build a dialogue among the differing standpoints that the poems represent. I will sketch a full unit which incorporates group research and presentation, individual writing, and in- and out-of-class discussion, with the expectation that this plan could be condensed and adjusted depending on the level, topic, context, and circumstances of the course. The unit could serve different purposes in different courses; for example, in a poetry course it could model approaches to historicist criticism, and in a course on nineteenth-century American social history it could model the use of poems as source texts. At the beginning of the unit the class members divide into three groups, each responsible for one of the three texts. In advanced classes, each group could also read theoretical texts (for Piatt, essays on modernist poetics or the construction of whiteness; for Harper, critical pedagogy or African American feminism; for Lambert, cultural criticism of urban modernity) to incorporate into the process that follows. Each group’s overall assignment is to identify the speaker’s “radical moment,” her moment of understanding her world in a way that allows her to transform her role in it, and to align themselves with the critical perspective that emerges from that moment in engaging in dialogue with the other two speakers. Their first assignment as a group is to stage a reading of the poem for the class. The purpose of these performances, besides giving students a chance to invest themselves in bringing the texts to life, is to begin to describe the world of

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these poems and the ways that the speakers occupy their world. Each group should brainstorm a presentation method suitable to its poem: will only one person speak, will the group members take turns reading by stanza, will they dramatize different voices? Would images, music, props, or silent tableaux help to illustrate what the poem offers as a description of its world? As they watch the other groups’ presentations, students should take notes on what they are witnessing. A brief written assignment, due for the following class session, will call students’ attention to what they do not know about the world they are recovering and lay groundwork for their efforts to describe it as richly as they can: All three poems are set in the same world. Describe the world they represent. How is this period of the past different from the world as you know it today? What do you need to know more about in order to understand this world more fully?

Based on their writing, the students brainstorm topics for further research. The instructor writes the ideas on the board, mapping out their connections, and solicits the class members’ suggestions for grouping topics into general category areas. The instructor may want to interject topic areas that foreground the themes of the course if they are overlooked in the brainstorming process, or replace the session with a list of areas for the groups to research in filling out their picture of each poem’s world. The group’s next task is to annotate the poem. Each group defines specific questions relevant to its poem within the broad topic areas and divides responsibility for research among its members. Depending on the topic of the course and the readings that preceded the unit, students might be asked to draw on prior readings for comparison or background (e.g., Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Uncle Tom’s Cabin); or the instructor might provide appropriate primary and secondary sources on library reserve or by way of the Internet. A website or album of illustrations and citations that illuminate the poem could be assigned, but this phase is not an end in itself; the purpose is to enrich the social and historical setting for each speaker so that the students are better able to identify the ways in which the speaker resists her world. Once they have annotated the text, each group’s next step is to get to know the speaker thoroughly and identify her “radical moment.” At this

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stage or earlier, at the beginning of the unit, the instructor can engage the class in clarifying how they will recognize a “radical moment” and the kinds of questions they need to explore in order to notice when and how a subject perceives the systemic construction of her identity and breaks, however partially, from its limitations. Depending on the context of the course, students could also produce questions about genre and representation which will call attention to the ways each speaker mediates her knowledge. In another brief writing assignment, group brainstorming, or both, students consider the questions they have generated, which might include: Who is the speaker in your poem? Describe her as fully as you can. What is her understanding of the world she occupies and her own role in it? Why does it matter to her to speak about her world in the way that she does? What literary devices does she use, and what do they suggest about her perspective on specific aspects of her world? Choose a passage that shows the speaker engaging in critical action, changing her position in relationship to her world. How does she go about it? What event, people, circumstances, or values contribute to her change? What are the consequences of the change?

The final phase of the unit engages each group in a critical reading of the other two poems. I would guide students away from a debate model, or from striving to invalidate one another’s positions. I would also tell students that the object is not simple pluralism—not to validate every viewpoint regardless of the subjects’ clashing views, partial awareness, or differences of place and power, but instead to give each subject access to a wider and deeper knowledge of herself and the world that the three subjects inhabit. At the beginning of units based on dialogue, I offer guidelines that emphasize actively listening to other voices and carefully articulating one’s own position. My students have found the following goals helpful as guides (although, of course, we may never fully achieve them): People with strong differences can relate to each other honestly and respectfully. Sacred assumptions can be openly and non-defensively explored. People can relate to each other as unique and complex human beings. The seemingly unspeakable can be spoken—and heard. People can seek a deep understanding of multiple and conflicting opinions and ideas.

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Even where there is disagreement and disapproval, understanding can displace animosity. By listening actively and speaking truth from their own perspective, people can expand their vision of what can be done.16

The dialogue might take place through written assignments, a message board, in-class discussion, dramatizations, or a combination of several of these media. Drawing on their research, each group critically analyzes the speaker’s world from the viewpoint she achieves through her “radical moment”; then each group responds to the others, first with clarifying questions. The dialogue could build around questions like these: You (the persona your group has been sponsoring) and the other speakers all occupy the same world. In what ways do their pieces of this world and their views of it differ most widely from your own? How do you react to the differences? What would it mean to you to accept each of the others’ positions as “true”? What did you not know before, and why? What do you not want to know, and how do you resist that knowledge? How might the extended awareness the others offer be useful to you? How would your piece of the world look to them? Where do they seem to get stuck, to avoid issues you consider important, and why do you think that happens? What do you most want each of the other speakers to understand?

As with any extended learning experience, the closing phase can be the most difficult and the most valuable. I would again refer the students to the guidelines for dialogue and offer them a limited goal. In dialoguebased units on topics that are likely to stir strong affective responses, I have followed Megan Boler’s lead and told students our only goals are to hear and express positional differences and notice what we find difficult to hear.17 Perhaps in an in-class writing exercise followed by discussion, I would invite students to travel back to the present as they know it, carrying their experience of recovering the past. Having begun the unit by attending to particulars of the differences between their world and the one we are recovering, I would now ask them to consider both: How is the world we recovered present in the one we occupy today? And: How is our world present in the way that we recovered the past? Ask them to stand back from the personae they have sponsored and consider how their own identities and views on the world, and those of others in their group, contributed to

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the shape of the group’s work. How were decisions made? What ideas did they focus on, what ideas were discarded or avoided, and why? Following discussion of these questions, I might ask: At what moments were we (as individuals or groups) able to grasp who we are and what we do as part of history? My expectation for this approach to teaching recuperated texts is that the learning will be unpredictably enriched by the students’ own capacities for reflecting on their play with race and time and articulating their stakes in the structure of social power, by their own capacities for reading the world “not as static reality, but as reality in process, in transformation.”18

IV • OTHER TIMES Childhood and Nonsense

9 The Containment of Childhood Reproducing Consumption in American Children’s Verse H a n n a h F l ag g G o u l d’s “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” and Sarah Piatt’s “A Child’s Party (in Kentucky, 185_)” are both children’s poems in the broad sense that they are about and at least partially for children. They have in common a richly articulated structure of elements that supports extension of the poetics of race and time into the study of childhood. Both of these poems set the stage for understanding the nineteenth-century formation of the category of childhood as involving retrogression across a temporal divide that mimics the divide separating historical from lyric time, or modernity from a racially heterogeneous oral folk culture. Both poems also illustrate how childhood could be a workshop where women poets modernized poetics: irony and absurdity rise from the gap between childhood unknowing and adult knowing, between the speaking present and the imagined past, and surrounding the ideological construction of femininity. Both poems feature fetishized, ironized, maternal racial others that work figurally to cast doubt on the efficacy of white motherhood as a model of women’s cultural agency and thus on the missions of republican motherhood and antebellum women’s print culture. In both poems, orality takes a central place, linking the transmission of cultural materials to consumption and raising problems about the substantiality of the objects consumed. Both poets make childhood performative and refer to the disciplinary containment of childhood acting out: while the child speaker may allow the poetic voice to evade gender-appropriate censorship, threats of punishment within the poems mark the censor’s active presence. Similarly, hints of precocity and sexuality suggest both the limits of appropriateness for women’s poetry and the limits of the category of childhood. Given these convergences, Gould’s and Piatt’s

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presentations of the gap between present and past convey contrasting historical moments in the poetics of childhood. “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy,” discussed in chapter 4, beautifully captures the effects of turning folk materials into children’s verse. Against the instructional strain in the poetics of its time, Gould’s poem problematizes the passing on of wisdom, making children the uncomprehending keepers of a preliterate past. Like a rite that has lost its significance over time, the mummy’s meaning has become arcane, while the remaining nonsense is mounted as a cultural heritage. Gould’s scene also illustrates modern childhood’s imbrication with popular culture: the folk body wrapped in textuality and exposed to a juvenile public captures the moment when technology and commerce translate a folk form into popular culture. Further, Gould’s poem implies the problem of what becomes of the disciplinary conditions surrounding a folk culture when its materials are translated into a democratic public sphere. Bakhtin’s theory explores the subversive possibilities of folk materials in relation to the “official” (patriarchal, ecclesiastic) culture of the Renaissance.1 But when folk subversion is personalized, privatized, and relegated to modern childhood, is the possibility of critique preserved? In Gould’s scenario, the incomprehensible past seems also to be a prescient vision of the future of the child’s public sphere as Habermas describes it, when consumption and publicity would emerge to supplant the ideal of civil discourse.2 The racial ambiguity of Gould’s mummy hints at anxieties surrounding this vision. The way that Gould structures these anxieties suggests they might be addressed through the allocation of consumption and public exposure along lines of race. The subversiveness absorbed into the modern idea of childhood would then have been turned to reinforcing the boundaries surrounding the construction of whiteness. The manipulation of folk resistance to reinforce racial difference will show its traces in other children’s poems discussed later in this chapter, although few of them overtly concern race. Set in this framework, the direct and complex representation of race in “A Child’s Party,” discussed in chapter 5, seems all the more remarkable. In effect, Piatt solves a problem that Gould presents—how American children’s literature is to come about—by modernizing the poetics of the scene. While Gould’s pairing of the sphere of public discourse with a distant, different space of folk performance produces nonsense, Piatt’s immersion of her white child in an other-raced performative world creates and

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protects a space of imaginative autonomy. Piatt’s solution, however, creates new problems. Ridiculing a black male reader, Piatt marks the stakes in defending the literary whiteness of children’s poetry despite her acknowledgment of its cross-racial sources. One sees the modernist relegation of blackness to the primitive in these stakes: black must be separated from literacy as much to protect the premodern quality of this imaginative space as to reserve literary access to its improvisational strategies for white childhood. Further, the historical proximity of the domestic relations of slavery as an imaginative folk space—a proximity that gives “A Child’s Party” the vitality that Gould’s poem cannot recapture—is individual and fragile; though affectively rich, Piatt’s story becomes exotic, “splendid,” inaccessible even in its telling. What has apparently become arcane and marginal is the poetics of race, specifically the knowledge of a white subject whose very desires have been constructed through racial others and within a raced social structure. In the earlier chapters of this book, I have argued that the changing racial structure contributed to the modernization of American women’s poetics, particularly the turn away from social engagement toward aesthetic autonomy. With this chapter, I explore nineteenth-century women’s verse for children, urging that the dynamic, unstable category of childhood also interacts with both the modernization of women’s poetics and the development of racial modernity through and beyond the end of slavery. Poetry and childhood were entwined throughout the nineteenth century, and their interrelation contributed to the emergence of specific aspects of modernist poetics. Writing for children called for simplified diction, formal concentration, the masking of adult (historical and political) concerns, and the encapsulation of abstract ideas in vivid images. Women took the lead in writing children’s verse early in the century, making children’s poetry part of the project of women’s print culture. The postbellum poets most highly regarded by their modernist successors—for example, Edith M. Thomas, Lizette Woodworth Reese, and most notably Emily Dickinson—wrote poems that have moved freely between children’s and adults’ collections, as if to write seriously for an adult reader were to address the child. This link had emerged in antebellum women’s poetics: at midcentury, Sarah Josepha Hale had praised Gould for satisfying the child reader’s taste.3 What changed by the later decades of the century was that pleasure overtook instruction as the dominant value in children’s poetics.

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By the 1870s, when women’s print culture declined, children’s literature, including poetry, had its own niches in the gender-neutral (but masculinist) marketplace of popular print. Women’s poetry for children involved the reciprocal construction of women’s and children’s subjectivity. The pairing of women and children may refer to women’s being identified as children—to their social, economic, and political infantilization. In a more dynamic sense, however, children were women’s partners, quarry, ideological products, and cultural artifacts. In The Mother’s Book (1831), Lydia Maria Child vividly illustrates the implications that new ideals of childhood held for maternal subjectivity early in the century. Beginning with a citation from Wordsworth’s “Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” Child goes on to say: “It is important, that children, even when babes, should never be spectators of anger, or any evil passion. They come to us from heaven, with their little souls full of innocence and peace; and, as far as possible, a mother’s influence should not interfere with the influence of angels.” Mothers must control their subjectivity with the greatest strictness, since even unexpressed negativity may have a “baneful influence.”4 The mutually constitutive relationship between womanhood and childhood extended beyond the citizen-forming project of republican motherhood: with the absorption of women’s public culture into postbellum capitalism, the woman-child dyad took up the formation of consumption roles. The adult effort to shape children is apparent in verses that emphasize instruction, but verses that emphasize pleasure are no less involved in constructing childhood. Poetry of pleasure may be less concerned with “bending the twig” toward a moral adulthood, but it is at least as concerned with adults’ revisionary impulses toward their own childhood and their investment of immediate desires in children. Fetishized children both capture adult imaginings of the sacred human essence and substitute for inaccessible objects of adult desires for pleasure and possession. The construction of childhood concerns the construction of adulthood: what makes an adult, how distant or near childhood is, whether it lies outside or within the adult subject, whether one’s own childhood is representative or marginal, whether change has disrupted the adult’s relationship with her own childhood. In “What the Train Ran Over” (1884), for example, Lucy Larcom gruesomely signifies the irretrievability of her early life by implying

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that her childhood companions were crushed by a train traveling along tracks newly laid through the rural area where she grew up.5 The backward temporal movement involved in adults’ writing for children is not only individual—it is historical; the idea of childhood works as a symbolic container for affect surrounding the adult’s passage across a historical divide. A review of the century’s most enduringly popular American poems by both men and women sketches the development of the category of childhood through popular culture. Early in the century, in “The Bucket” by Samuel Woodworth (1818) and “The Oak” by George Pope Morris (1837), childhood is a space of rugged, rural instruction whose values poetry must help to protect and preserve.6 The prescient and influential “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” (1823), long attributed to Clement Clark Moore,7 begins to represent childhood as an autonomous space but still exposes its being an adult construct: the children sleep and dream while paternal doubles, the speaker and a “jolly old elf,” oversee a vision of innocent, plentiful consumption. Exceptional among popular Civil War poems—most of them public voicings of militant, funereal, and conciliatory themes—is Elizabeth Akers Allen’s “Rock Me to Sleep,” a world-weary yearning for return to the comforts of a mother’s care, written before the war in 1860.8 In Allen’s poem, childhood is a retrospective haven against adult anguish. Ludic and children’s poems jointly dominate the popular hits of the late nineteenth century. Ernest L. Thayer’s deflation of heroic individualism, “Casey at the Bat,” subtitled “A Ballad of the Republic” (1888), marks the transition from war poetry to nonsense, while the play of language and image reigns in children’s poems by Charles Carryl (“A Nautical Ballad,” 1884) and Eugene Field (“Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” 1889, and “The Duel,” 1894).9 Frank Gelett Burgess’s highly self-conscious nonsense, “The Purple Cow” (1895), compactly recapitulates the century, encapsulating the generation of modern, popular, juvenile utterances out of agrarian materials. This sample of poems suggests that the popular imagination needed the category of childhood initially as a storage space for cherished residual values, but childhood became a device for dissipating historical trauma and resolving problems of value surrounding nonproducing consumerism. “The Duel” makes nonsense of a murderous internecine battle; “A Nautical Ballad” plays with inedible and nutritionless foods. Like poetry and woman, other social categories that acquired relative autonomy in the nineteenth century, modern childhood contains a mixture

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of attributes of ambivalent cultural value within modernity. The striving for freedom characteristic of such categories, which takes the form of masking their dependency on dominant social forces, is symptomatic of desires that the dominant culture frustrates. These autonomous categories take form in the midst of historical change in part to provide sanctuary for values that have little legitimacy in an increasingly regimented and ordered public life. Categories such as these may thus take on the features of something vestigial, retrograde—attached to a nostalgic reproduction of the past. Modern childhood preserves values such as spirituality, spontaneity, and imagination, but it is also a space of consumption. If regimentation and discipline are needed to produce, to consume requires playfulness, appetite, and taste, so that the marginalized values cultivated within the space of childhood are actually crucial working parts of capitalism. The retrograde space is thus also a space of the future, cultivating desires that can be fulfilled only by the continuing growth of industrial capitalism. Another literary category that came into its own in the nineteenth century, nonsense, converges with these attributes of the consumer role as well as with the modernization of poetics. Nonsense is arguably fundamental to poetry, both because formal and auditory strangeness is what distinguishes poetry from other kinds of writing and because nonsense represents poetry’s ontogenic and phylogenic origins: language acquisition and ritual performance.10 Nonsense thus pertains to the poetics of time: it is a resource retrieved from the reimagined past on the other side of an individual and historical temporal divide. Nonsense also applies, however, to the broader definition of poetics with which this study has been concerned— the construction and interrelation of social categories—as Susan Stewart abundantly demonstrates. The stuff of nonsense, Stewart writes, emerges from the ongoing process of “universes of discourse” borrowing from and transforming one another.11 When the activity of making “common sense” confronts contradictions, they can be set aside as “nonsense,” thus confining their disruptive activity to a space separated from the real.12 If nonsense begins as a collection of hermeneutic refuse, it becomes “a place to stand in the middle of change,” a refuge from the turmoil surrounding the processes of historical modernity.13 The functions of nonsense as a category unto itself are to explore the activity of category-making and to play with the boundaries of discourse; nonsense is thus that activity whose role is to typify the structure and activity of autonomous categories.

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In the readings of specific poems that follow in this chapter, I trace shifting and conflicting valuations and uses of nonsense as Romantic ideals of childhood displaced Calvinist views, then transformed as childhood absorbed the mandates that capitalism placed upon it. The immediate precursor to the positive view of nonsense that such antebellum progressives as Eliza Follen held may have been the use of nonsensical phrases for instruction.14 Follen’s approval of nonsense in the 1830s predates the careers of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, the Victorians who established nonsense verse as a literary mode sponsored by childhood. The Victorians’ uses of nonsense to revalue dismissed cultural materials and recover pleasure from moral and intellectual authority depended upon inverting their precursors’ meaning for the word. For the neoclassical satirists, “nonsense” had been the ultimate derision for oddness and incompetence.15 Coleridge and Keats signaled Romanticism’s role in changing the word’s fortunes, giving the title “Nonsense” to lines they composed as formal experiments unconcerned with meaning, and thus anticipating the convergence between the anarchic formalism of nonsense and the experimental formalism of elite modernist poetics. For Theodor Adorno, nonsense in modernist poetics captures “language’s chimerical yearning for the impossible,” an expression of the subject’s longing to merge with the other (see chapter 1).16 W. H. Auden, too, among others viewing nonsense through the screen of psychoanalysis, took it to be an appeal to the unconscious for a utopian world where social categories such as class and gender do not divide.17 Claims such as this for a political efficacy for the psycholinguistic dimension of nonsense converge with arguments drawn from Bakhtin’s theory claiming an inherent subversiveness to the spirit of carnival. However, Noam Chomsky’s nonsense sentence, “Powerless green ideas sleep furiously,”18 seems to me more accurately to capture the static, undirected political energy of nonsense—its being a dream-space for marginal, nascent drives that may or may not collect historical force, like the subversive play of the children in Piatt’s “A Child’s Party.” Stewart repeatedly emphasizes the contingent and emergent nature of nonsense: its formal processes as well as its content are made up of the “system of differences” in the everyday world.19 This chapter works toward exploring nonsense produced out of the “borrowing and transforming” that occur in meetings between the discursive categories of childhood and race. “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” and “A Child’s Party” both offer instances of the in-

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corporation of racial difference into white childhood, illustrating different phases in the production of nonsense: for Gould, the racial other signifies that which cannot be turned into meaning, and for Piatt, racial others are the very agents of play, of nonsense, of activities freed from the necessity of making sense in the larger social world. My exploration of the gradual embrace of nonsense in nineteenth-century American women’s poetry for children suggests that to celebrate nonsense, pleasure, or carnival as an evasion of divisive social forces is to overlook their versatility as tools for reinventing difference, rebuilding barriers, and redirecting the movement of cultural goods. Nonsense thus also pertains to the poetics of race. The Smell of a Rat, the Whiteness of the Lamb Two antebellum poems, “The Three Little Kittens” and “Mary’s Lamb,” remain today thoroughly assimilated into the vocabulary of early childhood.20 The origins of these poems richly illustrate the circumstances under which the Romantic concept of childhood emerged in American literary culture. Both poems first appeared in small books published in the 1830s by the Sunday school movement, a major source of published children’s literature throughout the century, and in 1843 both poems were absorbed into Mother Goose. The two nursery rhymes address a categorical confusion that Susan Stewart describes as one of the oldest and most prevalent sources of nonsense, the merging of animal and human.21 But the women who attached their names to the books in which these poems were first published, Eliza Lee Follen and Sarah Josepha Hale, held opposite views on the relative merits of pleasure and instruction. While Follen embraced nonsense, Hale strictly—but unsuccessfully—resisted it.22 Eliza Follen, a member of a prominent Boston family, helped to found a Unitarian Sunday school and edited two Sunday school publications, The Christian Teacher’s Manual and The Child’s Friend. “The Three Little Kittens” appeared in a British edition of Follen’s Little Songs, for Little Boys and Girls and has been attributed to her, but her introduction to a subsequent American edition makes clear that it was an anonymous piece added by the British publisher.23 Its origin was thus very likely English, but Follen embraced its inclusion in later editions of her book and may have altered it; in the 1856 American edition “The Three Little Kittens” bears a subtitle, “A Cat’s Tale, with Additions.” In the introduction to the first edition of Little Songs (1833), Follen champions oral play, stating her aspiration to replicate

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the “musical nonsense” of Mother Goose; children happily “lisping” her poems is all the critical approval she seeks. Her own poems capture moments of identity formation in simple, almost Blakean language but never approach the buoyant satirical nonsense of “The Three Little Kittens.” In contrast, Hale’s introduction to Poems for Our Children (1830), in which “Mary’s Lamb” appeared, acknowledges that children love to recite verses but sternly insists that reciting “silly rhymes” is a waste of their time. Her aim is not just pious but nationalistic—children’s poetry should teach them love of country. “Mary’s Lamb,” one of the most frequently parodied poems in English, thus entered the popular imagination by way of the serious didactic project of republican motherhood. Hale articulates this project’s relation to children’s literature in her long poem “The Three Hours,” which follows a colonial woman, Grace Morton, as she waits on a stormy night for her husband to return from a meeting. The setting is a cabin at the edge of a wilderness settlement, the precursor to Boston. Hale reminds the reader that this was the age of superstition, before minds were freed by the alliance of Christianity with science. Grace remembers a frightening story her mother told her about a knight imprisoned in a haunted castle who kept demons away by prayer. Her mother used this story to teach her to fend off evil by praying every hour as the clock struck, and she follows this advice, though she vows to her young son: “Never shall such tales of dread Be told to you as I have heard,— And never shall your soul be stirred, While faith is warm, and reason slow, With scenes of fear and thoughts of wo[e] . . .”24

American mothers were to produce stories that nurtured a new kind of citizen, abolishing the violent and superstitious character traits associated with feudal folk narratives and replacing them with enlightened Christian gentleness. Hale’s opinion that verbal play interferes with appropriate learning represents a prominent view among literary women of the era, one that Lydia Maria Child shared.25 Follen, however, provided early critiques of narrowly didactic instruction. In her juvenile novel-cum-conduct book, The Well Spent Hour (1848), young James declares his antipathy to the morals appended to Aesop’s Fables because “any body would know what it means

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without being told.” In her poem “Lines on Nonsense” (1839), nonsense is a weathervane, a reliable measure of change, while reason is the “stalking tenfoot rule” of a punitive teacher who fails to keep up with the times. Follen’s insight here matches Stewart’s: change generates “nonsense,” a scrambling of familiar sights, sounds, and constructs. Follen’s novel Sketches of Married Life (1838) elaborates this insight. Two young women, best friends, mature through a dialectic of their character traits. Amy is a principled exemplar of republican womanhood whose only flaw is self-righteous rigidity, and Fanny is a “nonsensical” coquette (her speech sometimes worthy of Oscar Wilde)26 whose attentiveness to the ever-shifting quotidian makes her at first dangerously shallow but later well suited to a life of good works. Follen’s and Hale’s opposing views on nonsense parallel the ideological tensions that unfolded as the Sunday school movement formalized children’s religious education. The earliest Sunday schools taught literacy to lower-class children, but from 1810 on, these programs were gradually supplanted by evangelical Sunday schools conceived as extensions of middleclass family religious training. The pedagogical basis for these classes combined the evangelical concept of original sin with Locke’s idea of tabula rasa, which also helped to justify republican motherhood by giving weight to the childhood environment’s role in forming citizens. Childhood became viewed as a period of vast spiritual potential; while still pliable, children could experience conversion and be disciplined to self-mastery, which would prove a bulwark against the worldly temptations of ever-advancing modernity.27 The Unitarians, however, including Follen, disagreed with the evangelicals about the innate sinfulness of human beings. Follen and her husband Charles, a self-exiled liberal German intellectual, were among the earliest American promoters of the theories of the Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi (1746–1827), introduced to the United States in the 1820s. Pestalozzi’s view was that educators should not aim to conquer children’s impulses but to understand and nurture their inherently spiritual nature. Pestalozzi’s progressive Romanticism helps to explain an apparent paradox in Follen’s embrace of aural play: the Follens were outspoken abolitionists, and aesthetic critics from Poe to Matthiessen have held abolitionists responsible for the most egregious didacticism in American poetry, yet Follen insisted on the rule of pleasure in children’s verse. Stephen Nissenbaum points out that the Follens’ views on slavery and pedagogy converged in empathy for the pow-

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erless and abhorrence of violent and coercive discipline, but also that the ideal of childhood as an imaginative, innocent, autonomous space served as a refuge for people like the Follens whose radicalism alienated them from the wider community.28 Their Pestalozzian views kept the Follens (together with other progressive educators such as Bronson Alcott) in an often suspect minority during the 1830s, but with the advance of capitalism, the Romantic view of childhood became the dominant one. In her history of the Sunday school movement, Anne M. Boylan writes that bourgeois fears of regimentation “found expression in a new emphasis on the importance of spontaneity, impulse, playfulness, and leisure within the private sphere. . . . Childhood represented the expression of emotions that were banished from the workplace and public life.”29 Corresponding to the era Boylan discusses of competing evangelical and Romantic views of childhood was the assemblage of the miscellany of verse known in the United States as Mother Goose. Spanning three centuries, the Mother Goose collection is a rich mine of categorical transgressions: violations of the boundaries between authored and anonymous, modern and premodern, print and oral, official and folk, adult and child. Of the older, anonymous folk poems in the collection, some were political satire, some were not, and the historical origins of many are irretrievable. Also among both the folk and authored poems are lullabies, games, riddles, and mnemonics—forms specific to the verbal relationship between adult and child.30 Assembled during the period when American women were gaining in literacy (and finished just as they achieved parity with men), the Mother Goose project called attention to women’s preliterate cultural functions by taking as its title figure the storytelling crone who was the fictive source for Charles Perrault’s collection of folk tales, Les Contes de ma mère l’Oye (1697). “The Three Little Kittens” and “Mary’s Lamb” share as an ancestor one of the oldest categories of folk games collected in Mother Goose, the infants’ and toddlers’ “peek-a-boo” or “bo-peep” game.31 The modern codification of this game is the nursery rhyme about Little Bo-Peep, the shepherd girl who lost her sheep. The game, which an older playmate initiates by hiding her face behind her hands and then revealing her eyes, anticipates the game of fort-da that Freud described and provides practice in the developmental milestone called object constancy in object relations theory. The child learns that objects continue to exist even when he or she cannot perceive them. Object constancy is theoretically fundamental to a child’s establish-

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ing a sense of trust and safety, because the primary object is the adult on whom the child depends for care. The bo-peep game also, however, refers to the mirror stage; the child acts out its own identity continuity by mimicking the older playmate’s mysterious disappearance and triumphant reappearance. Both “The Three Little Kittens” and “Mary’s Lamb” thus concern identity formation, but they model different patterns for inducting the child into the structures of adult authority and produce vastly different kinds of nonsense. Like many of the anonymous poems in Mother Goose, “The Three Little Kittens” may or may not have once had allegorical meaning; if so, it has not been retrieved. The sophistication of “The Three Little Kittens,” however, lends plausibility to its having been authored by someone like Follen rather than emerging out of folk origins. The kittens occupying Bo-Peep’s place, the place of the child who fears she has lost something, make the poem curiously modern, domestic, and bourgeois. With their mittens and pie, these are not barn cats. The choice of “mittens” as the object they have lost sets up a tactile “rhyme” of fuzziness as well as the auditory rhyme, but it also elegantly represents the Cartesian separation between nature and culture. Sound summons the pie, too, into the poem through the need for a rhyme for “cry”; the orality of speaking summons the orality of eating, the kittens’ reward for reuniting with their mittens. But this is not a reunion with nature; the mittens and pie absurdly civilize the kittens, alienating them from cat nature. The poem compensates the human child for this alienation by providing plentiful opportunities to imitate animal sounds (just the sort of nonsense Hale deplored). Further, the smell of the rat resolves the poem’s violation of the difference between cats and humans and restores their proper relationship, since cats’ killing of rats is a reason why humans value them. Detecting a common enemy also puts a happy ending on a disciplinary cycle that gives a moral twist to the sense of identity practiced in this poem. The maternal authority declares the kittens naughty, silly, naughty, and good. But the domestic manners to which she is socializing them set the children up for failure: kittens must wear mittens to eat pie, but if they get pie on their mittens, they are bad. This absurd disciplinary pattern is not strictly coercive or imposed; penalties are light, and the children reveal their eager dependency on the mother’s judgment by reporting regularly to her about their woes and triumphs, probably trying her patience (“You silly kit-

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tens!”). And, despite the absurdity of the rules, the children do make progress toward autonomy and mastery—they find and wash their own mittens and, with the rat hunt, begin a serious lesson in adult catlikeness. Socialization is inescapably absurd, the poem seems to say, and alienation strikes at the earliest stages of the subject’s development; but the poem offers mastery over the split between subject and object through care of one’s possessions and group solidarity against a common other. No nonsense is built into the sensory qualities of “Mary’s Lamb”; nonsense rather emerges from the poem’s moral and symbolic structure and accrues to its language over a history of countless repetitions. The purported moral is kindness to animals, stated in the now-forgotten last half of the last stanza: “And you each gentle animal In confidence may bind, And make them follow at your call, If you are always kind.” (ll. 21–4)

The narrative, however, makes this moral sound forced, even hypocritical. The didact speaking here is the same teacher who has ejected Mary’s lamb from the classroom, cracking down on the children’s disruptive joy and the possibility of free play in the poem itself. Rather than exploring why a lamb may not stay in the school, the poem assumes that the institution is benign while offering an interpretation of the bond between Mary and the lamb. But the kindness Hale preaches depends upon the categorical separation of child and animal. The moral compensates for this separation by promising command through condescension, but traces of the conflation of child and animal show in its being the lamb who suffers isolation as he waits alone for Mary to reappear, like a child beginning to grasp object constancy. Separated from the animal-child, Mary is a maternal figure, a junior republican mother learning her role. The extent of the task of separating child from animal becomes vivid when one allows into the poem the Christian symbolic structure that the first line cannot help but recall: Mary and her lamb, Madonna and child.32 William Blake captured the metonymic chain lamb-child-Christ for children’s verse in “The Lamb” (Songs of Innocence, 1789), but Hale must turn this chain of meanings out from her schoolhouse if the poem’s instruction is to stand. If the lamb is Christ, Hale has preached alienation from and

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mastery over the sacred; the lamb must be simply a lamb. At the same time, to support the moral of kindness to animals, Hale must also exclude the lamb’s agrarian meaning and value. Other now-forgotten lines from the second stanza alienate Mary from agricultural production while removing the possibility of consumption from the poem: And then he ran to her, and laid His head upon her arm, As if he said—“I’m not afraid— You’ll keep me from all harm.” (ll. 13–6)

This lamb will not be slaughtered and eaten. “Mary’s Lamb” captures a moment of social change when the content of children’s education has become something quite apart from agrarian life. The classroom is a place to learn not how to care for farm animals but how to treat them as object lessons and to practice gentle command. The lamb’s exaggerated whiteness—demanded by the poem’s rhyme scheme—is all that remains of his allegorical and agricultural functions, leaving him to stand in for the Lockean blank slate. The lamb thus enters a long roster of American white beasts—from Moby-Dick to Robert Frost’s darkness-abolishing spider33 to E. B. White’s beleaguered Wilbur the pig and well beyond—that pertain to terrors in the construction of American racial whiteness. That “Mary’s Lamb” also concerns the construction of racial whiteness must be argued with evidence from beyond this poem, but other sources show that Hale’s insistence on the “gentleness” of the American mission leads to her excluding from its boundaries the people of color against whom prolonged national violence had been directed. In addition to her evasiveness about slavery, for instance, Hale, who campaigned through three presidencies to have Thanksgiving declared a national holiday, left Native Americans out of her depiction of the first Thanksgiving in Northwood (1827); the Pilgrims’ feast arrives on a fortuitous English ship. And, in The Three Hours (1848), Grace Morton’s terror of Indians lurking in the forest takes over for and merges with her fear of demons. Hale succeeded well enough in confining the possible meanings of “Mary’s Lamb” to representational realism such that it attracted several women’s claims to have been the original Mary. One such claim led Henry Ford to purchase the supposed original schoolhouse and hire scholars to

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prove a twelve-year-old boy had written “Mary’s Lamb.”34 Over time, however, “Mary had a little lamb” took on the life of a quintessential nonsense utterance. They were the words Thomas Edison chose to record first on the phonograph, and they were among the words a baffled Steve Allen chose to contribute to Frank Zappa’s first televised musical “happening.”35 This reduction of moral tale to aural play was well under way by 1873, when Mary Mapes Dodge edited the first volume of St. Nicholas, quickly the premier children’s magazine. In “The Trio,” Mary A. Lathbury synthesizes the nonsensical three kittens with Hale’s poem to produce three sheep which a child attempts to conduct in a recitation of “Mary’s Lamb” (fig. 9): Silly creatures, what a bother! Making eyes at one another. Mind your notes, and look at me,— Faster Billy! Louder, Nan! Wake the echoes if you can. Let us make this trio ring,— One,—two,—three,—sing: “Mary had a little lamb, Mary had a little lamb, Mary had a little l-a-a-mb, Its fleece was white as snow, And everywhere that Mary we-ent, The lamb was sure to go.”36

9. Closing the gap between text and oral performance. Illustration to “The Trio” by Mary A. Lathbury, St. Nicholas 1 (March, 1874): 283.

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Nonsense has won. The problem remains children’s mastery over animals, but the moral has long since dropped away. Didacticism, however, did not simply disappear from postbellum children’s verse. A poem of her own that Dodge published in the first volume of St. Nicholas, “Shepherd John,” revises and extends the lesson of “Mary’s Lamb” rather than reducing it to nonsense. The title figure, as described in the first stanza, might be a Christ figure; he is a paragon of pastoral virtues whose “arm is quick to save” (fig. 10). But like Hale, Dodge pulls Christian language into her poem only to resist the symbolic structure it implies, replacing it with realist concerns about the modernization of agrarian subjects. Dodge goes beyond Hale by rendering archaic the virtue of kindness to animals, which Shepherd John possesses in abundance. A figure of folk culture, John devalues his own labor, telling his son that he remains in his occupation only because of his childhood lack of interest in books. Curiously, while Hale institutionalizes schooling as something apart from farm life, Dodge naturalizes reading within the folk scene. Surely to the detriment of the sheep, John advises his son to read while they graze so that he may advance to the “grander fields” of the wide world (fig. 11). John is not

10. Shepherd John, Christ-like anachronism. Mary Mapes Dodge, Rhymes and Jingles (New York, 1875) 60.

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11. Beyond crying wolf: Shepherd John’s son prepares for a life of adventure. Dodge, Rhymes and Jingles 61.

urging his son to avoid labor; there is “muckle work to do” in the world beyond the flock. In evangelical parlance this phrase might refer to enlarging the Christian flock, but here it must mean kinds of labor—bureaucratic, professional, specialist—for which the primary qualifying skill is reading, and not necessarily the scripture. John’s “muckle,” the strongest sign of his mock-Scots dialect, works as a kernel of auditory playfulness retrieved from an imagined folk culture; it associates John with Romantic nostalgia, particularly by way of Robert Burns’s much-imitated dialect verse; and it registers the shepherd’s ignorance of modern literate diction. Even as it uses John’s rustic virtue to lend his voice authority, the poem shows his preliterate world passing out of usefulness as a source for modern childhood. Reading has become a value in itself apart from moral instruction; Dodge’s poem works as an advertisement for her field of expertise, children’s literature. From Gould to Dodge Hannah Flagg Gould’s penchant for capturing tensions in antebellum literary culture makes her children’s poems an especially useful starting point in tracing what becomes of “green ideas”—emergent ideological constructions—as they undergo historical change. Dodge’s children’s poems, which she published in Rhymes and Jingles (1875) and used in the first volume of St. Nicholas, coincide with the magazine’s founding editorial mis-

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sion and thus with an orientation toward childhood that remained influential well into the twentieth century. A comparison of Gould’s “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” with Dodge’s “The Way to Do It” helps to highlight the contrast between an antebellum, republican model of childhood and one emerging within postbellum specialist culture. Dodge printed “The Way to Do It” in the Letter Box column of St. Nicholas in response to a request from an eleven-year-old boy for a recitation piece that would give his younger brother “a chance to be dramatic.”37 Like “The Child’s Address,” “The Way to Do It” puts words in the mouth of a child speaking in public. But where Gould’s child is a civic speaker interested in knowledge, Dodge’s child is a performer demonstrating his elocutionary expertise. In both poems, form is alienated from social content. For Gould, as I discussed in chapter 4, this separation is revealingly problematic, but for Dodge, it enables form to become content. The elocution movement grew out of late-eighteenth-century modernizations of classical oratory, took hold quickly in the American colonies, and remained in school curricula well into the twentieth century. Elocutionists sought to standardize both the pronunciation of spoken language and its expressive qualities. Elocution handbooks spelled out detailed rules for varying the voice, enunciation, posture, and gesture to create nuanced emotional effects consistent with the content of a recitation. At stake was not just the elimination of dialects but the production of a common set of bodily signs representing shared feelings. In the first half of the century, elocution thus played a role in efforts to cultivate and standardize the individual American citizen to counteract fears about the mindlessness of the democratic masses. Later in the century, elocution became an occupation, and the elocutionist was as much an entertainer as a didact. The object of elocution was to seize and embody the spirit of the author; rather than being, like the orator, a public authority by virtue of one’s status as a citizen, the elocutionist was a medium translating authoritative texts into a reproduced material presence.38 Whereas “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” speaks to the body of an unknown other, seeking to assemble knowledge out of its visible parts, “The Way To Do It” addresses the body of the speaker, telling its parts what to do. If Gould plays with the unknowability of the premodern other, Dodge eliminates the other altogether by making the child’s own body the topic of its oral performance. Read as a narrative, the series of

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postures Dodge’s poem describes mime a devolution from plain speaking to melodrama, corresponding to a transition from civil public sphere to theater. The sequence of postures permits the expression of transgressive impulses, but the child acts out their resolution through the capital disciplinary act of assassination, playing the parts of both the murderer and the victim. The first stanza might describe idealized republican oratory: “I bring my words out clear / And plain.” Then novelty strikes in the second stanza with eye and hand gestures representing surprise. Fun follows in the third stanza and objection in the fourth, as if a voice of protest had arisen from or against the mode of pleasure. Stanza 5 brings fear, stanza 6 tragedy, as the performer seizes an “airy dagger” and speaks the only verbal content that the script provides: “WRETCH!”—the climax of the child’s permission to act out. Protest has brought about mayhem and murder; stanza 6 represents a villain’s gasping death. Finally, in the seventh stanza, the performer’s body, separated from the fictions it has embodied, returns to life to accept applause. Implicit in this series of poses are the violent dramas of heroic power struggle—those, for example, in Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies. These stories, however, have been reduced to techniques to be endlessly rehearsed. The child’s performance sets their content at a distance where their details disappear, thus relieving speaker and audience of their traumatic dimension. Formalizing trace elements of culture, the script enlists the performing child as an agent in forgetting, thus merging the body of the child with a modernist impulse to overthrow antecedent cultural materials through parodic mastery. Comparison of another pair of poems by Gould and Dodge, “Apprehension” and “The Wooden Horse,” helps to articulate a profound change in the construction of childhood’s boundaries. For Gould, childhood is a time of introduction to physical, social, and theological dangers; for Dodge, children are to be protected from danger through deferral of contact with the real. In Gould’s “Apprehension,” a child—ungendered as in “The Child’s Address”—expresses anxiety about riding a horse. The child’s language becomes muddled with the language of parable, so that—again as in “The Child’s Address”—the child speaker comically raises themes beyond its comprehension. The poem is a dialogue between the child and a moralizing mother; there is also a third, unspeaking presence, a sister who is either trying to teach her younger sibling to ride or merely egging the child on.

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The child’s ambivalence about mounting Brutus—the brute and potential betrayer—is almost sexual and feminizes the ungendered speaker: “Though I want the ride, he will spoil it all.” Here as in “The Slave Mother’s Prayer” and “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy,” Gould marks both the limits of childhood and the entrance to public modernity with hints of sexuality, echoing the republican seduction narrative and its conflict between desire and control.39 At the child’s request, in the second stanza the mother repeats a conventional parable about the world’s competitiveness, framed as a horse race that leaves failed riders weeping by the road. The final stanza restates the first. To the sister, the child expresses eroticized fear: Brutus’s flesh “creeps at my touch—and he winks an eye.” Addressing the mother, the child asks for a happy ending to the parable of the horse race: who helped the world recover from its fall? The implicit Sunday school answer is Jesus Christ, but the question implies that the kind of cautionary moralizing that the mother’s stanza represents fails to address the child’s immediate experience. The child wants and needs to take physical and spiritual risks, whether she remains in the agrarian world or leaves it and enters the competitive landscape of modernity. Gould here exposes the inadequacy of didacticism and demands that genteel culture produce new solutions to the problems of growing up. For a modernized middle class that does not need its children to ride horses and can afford to buy toys, Dodge’s “The Wooden Horse” offers the solution of imaginative play. With a manufactured horse, a child can fulfill its desire to ride without physical risk; theologically, the commodity is to defer the fall and thus substitute for the need for salvation. The words Dodge puts into the child speaker’s mouth read like an advertisement restructuring an existing desire—perhaps an adult, urban nostalgia for the rural—into the desirability of the commodity: “A real horse is good, / but a horse made of wood / Is a much better horsey for me.” But the advertisement must have to work hard against contrary ideological claims on the child, because it takes six stanzas to reach the point that a wooden horse will bring the child home alive. In the interim, the poem describes in negative everything that makes a horse animate; the child rider is to be protected not only from “a crash, / Or a runaway smash” but also from the annoyance and labor of caring for and controlling a horse. Dodge enlists the child reader in persuading itself that artifice is better than the animate, that the repetitive, uneventful, imaginary ride is “playful and free,” and thus in

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disassociating childhood from the natural while preserving its romantic innocence and spontaneity. The wooden horse, however, lends woodenness to the child. The troubles a real horse can cause also apply to children. This irony makes the naive speaker sound humorously effete; the last stanzas seem to anticipate Dorothy Parker’s rationalizing away suicidal impulses (“You might as well live”): A real horse, some day, Will be running away; A donkey is so apt to kick; A goat will upset you, A doggie will fret you— Your wooden horse hasn’t a trick! No chance of a crash, Or a runaway smash, Though never so playful and free. Oh! I like when I drive To be brought home alive— So a fine wooden horsey for me! (ll. 25–36)

The irony, however, does not make this poem a satire on children who play with toys. It arises from submerged disciplinary messages: like the wooden horse, children should obey and try to please, should not be lazy or tease, should be gentle and kind. Where a didactic poet like Hale would have made these messages overt, Dodge’s poem guides the child to impose them on an objectified other, an internalization and re-projection of didactic controls. “The Wooden Horse” thus not only responds to an adult desire to protect children from harm; it also addresses fears that the Romantic child—freed from the constraints of didacticism—might be horselike, willful, impassioned, violent. Representing such impulses while eliminating their consequences, the commodity contains childhood by succeeding to the republican mother’s instructional role while transforming the parable of the world’s race into a reified fiction of free play. Implicit in the Romantic ideal of childhood is the idea that improvisational play—natural, associative movement from one expressive state to another—is the peculiar expertise of childhood. To acquire such a value, play needed rescuing from its didactic connection to nonproductive

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leisure. In Hale’s “The Boy, the Bee, and the Butterfly, a Fable” (1830), for example, a boy who wants to be a butterfly meets a bee who convinces him that he does not; his playful impulses quickly corrected, the boy goes to school. Gould, with her characteristically complex vision, politicizes the opposition of play and work in “The Butterfly’s Dream” (1832). She urges the child audience to industry with a threatening fable about worker bees’ deadly revolt against a conspicuously leisured butterfly whose name (King Paipilio) and frenchified diction (“parterre”) identify him with the doomed French monarchy of the revolutionary era. Dodge attacks the problem of play in several poems by validating children’s identification with the leisured class and rendering politics absurd. Gould’s fable, on one level, is a lesson about class conflict and revolution. She complicates the generic register of fable, however, by framing the conflict between the aristocrat and the workers as the butterfly’s dream. The frame allows her to punish the butterfly twice, first through the bees’ victory, then, after he wakes up, by pelting him with hailstones. The bees turn out to be an internal force, perhaps fear or guilt, their volcanic eyes doubled with the “suppressed ebullitions of pride” through which the butterfly finally self-destructs. Gould thus internalizes revolutionary conflict while naturalizing the fall from pride. At the same time, the dream narrative draws the audience into the butterfly’s interior life, giving the royal figure an individualized subjectivity that the swarm of dream-bees lacks, so that he invites our identification and his demise seems at least partly tragic. In the first stanza Gould links the butterfly with early childhood: “rocked in a cradle of crimson and gold, / The careless young slumberer lay.” Gould wryly implicates the reader in the dangers of extended infantility in the third stanza: like someone idly enjoying Gould’s sensuous opening lines, “indolent lovers of change” (Gould’s emphasis) keep “the body at ease in its place, / Giving fancy permission to range.” The stanzas that follow quickly translate infancy into aristocratic megalomania and disdain. On one hand, Gould’s fable pushes the romanticization of childhood toward absurd consequences, exposing the utter contradiction between a fetishized and indulged childhood and a diligent adult workforce. On the other hand, the problem is not childhood but Romantic individuation: the butterfly, a self defined in opposition to social forces, suffers narcissistic anguish because of the capacity of his opponents to depose his sovereign self-representation.

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For the readers of St. Nicholas, Dodge abolished complications from the fabled opposition between butterflies and hardworking bees. “The Bee and the Butterfly,” a poem published in the first volume, has none of the political or psychological tension of Gould’s poem; the separation between play and work, consumer and producer, is merely amusing. “Dear me! dear me!” Said a busy bee, “I’m always making honey,— No time to play, But work all day. Isn’t it very funny— Very, very funny?” “Oh, my! oh, my!” Said a butterfly, “I’m always eating honey; And yet I play The livelong day. Isn’t it very funny— Very, very funny?”40

The productively spent work day that Benjamin Franklin’s “early to bed, early to rise” invokes vanishes in Dodge’s demolition of his prescription for success. Playing with the temporal vagueness of “early,” Dodge winds up paying tribute to extreme, even slothful leisure: Early to bed and early to rise: If that would make me wealthy and wise I’d rise at daybreak, cold or hot, And go back to bed at once. Why not?

In “Tinker, come bring your solder,” Dodge condenses work time to no time at all and scrambles occupational functions: Tinker, come bring your solder, And mend this watch for me. Haymaker, get some fodder, And give my cat his tea. Cobbler, my horse is limping,

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He’ll have to be shod anew; While the smith brings forge and hammer To make my daughter a shoe. Bestir yourselves, my lazies! I give you all fair warning: You must do your work ’twixt twelve at night, And an hour before one in the morning.41

The poem could work as a test of its audience’s maturity: while a younger child might enjoy an imperious delivery of unfamiliar words, an older child who knows about the clock and providers of specialized services could enjoy feeling superior to the adult who issues such inappropriate commands. But the maternal voice of children’s verse can no longer be relied upon for uplifting advice about kindness to others or about how one should spend one’s time; instead, she has made play out of others’ labor. Dodge rescues children’s play from didacticism, then, in part by taking away from children’s verse the time in which adult work occurs, while making nonsense out of the power relations of leisure and labor. The political descendant of Gould’s arrogantly lazy King Paipilio in Dodge’s verse is the absurdly busy Mayor of Scuttleton. The world of Scuttleton is confusingly modern, full of manufactured objects whose functions are muddled: “He loaded a shovel, and tried to shoot, / And killed the calf in the leg of his boot.” At the same time, the corruption of language suggests the deterioration of politics. Perhaps worse than an oligarch, the mayor acts on whim, assuming an official function only after consuming taffy: “he taxed the town / And read the newspaper upside down.” A skewed patriot, he inverts Yankee Doodle’s dandyism by hanging his hat on a feather before calling a town meeting. The name of the town is rich with potential wordplay: “scuttle” means agitated or confused movement, the purposeful sinking of a ship, and a container for carrying coal. Everyone is scuttling around Scuttleton and the “ship” of state has perhaps been scuttled, but the coal scuttle has the strongest determining presence. It dictates that the town will be a cold place where the bumbling mayor burns his nose trying to warm his toes, signs his will with an icicle quill, and frightens his grandmother half to death by going bareheaded and holding his breath. “The Mayor of Scuttleton” curiously combines associative language play with neoclassical “nonsense,” portraying an incompetent eccentric, so that

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even as it models free play, the poem invites the child audience to feel superior to the object of satire that it creates. The mayor might be a stubborn, impulsive child whose lack of mastery over language and things creates chaos for those around him. His misuse of objects allows the child reader to take pride in its own mastery of objects and its ability to read right side up. But the mayor is also a political figure whose behavior invites the child to regard adult public life as absurd. Dodge gives no sign that angry workers or hailstones will end the mayor’s tenure: “But the worst of it all was, nobody knew / What the Mayor of Scuttleton next would do.” More of an audience than a political constituency, the townspeople are powerless against the mayor’s whim, but to the child reader Dodge offers wordplay as an inexhaustible compensation for disempowerment and the incomprehensibility of adult life. Gould’s poems discussed in this section all confront developmental and historical divisions surrounding childhood, exploring the inadequacies of available cultural resources in crossing over from childhood into the adult world. Dodge, in contrast, uses adult materials to reinforce the boundaries surrounding childhood. In her fiction as well as her verse, Dodge works quickly to defuse narrative crises and thus to disengage childhood from ideological instability. Children must be animated and expressive, but one can perform even alarm without there being anything to be alarmed about: Fire in the window! flashes in the pane! Fire on the roof-top! blazing weather-vane! Turn about, weather-vane! put the fire out! The sun’s going down, sir, I haven’t a doubt.

Atlanta is not burning. Some one in the garden murmurs all the day; Some one in the garden moans the night away; Deep in the pine-trees, hidden from our sight, He murmurs all day, and moans all the night.42

Nature is haunted, but no one is fleeing slavery or mourning the dispersal of his tribe. While the nonsense produced in the gap between adult and child awareness gave Gould access to critical terrain, Dodge used it to condense historical trauma into the stuff of dreams.

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From Hans Brinker to St. Nicholas: Carnival, Childhood, Class Dodge’s editorial orientation toward childhood in her most influential project, St. Nicholas: Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys, returns us to a question I posed about Gould’s “Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy” at the beginning of this chapter: What becomes of the subversive impulses of folk culture when folk materials are allocated to bourgeois childhood? Susan R. Gannon and Ruth Anne Thompson cite Bakhtin on the carnivalesque to account for how, despite having a didactic agenda, Dodge made her magazine a “pleasure-ground” where children could “have their own way.”43 By celebrating open sociability and presenting a playful world that is “one great communal performance,” they claim, St. Nicholas “offered a subversive, imaginative vision of a world open to change,” including the transgression of social boundaries.44 Dodge’s bestknown prose work, Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates (1865), provides cues about the limitations of viewing her achievement in this light. In a prospectus for St. Nicholas, Dodge writes of the ideal children’s magazine: “The spirit of mirthfulness shall be invoked from the first, and all good things fresh, true, and child-like, heartily commended, while every way to juvenile priggishness shall be bolted and barred as far as the management can effect.”45 The sentence echoes chapter 9 of Hans Brinker, where a topsy-turvy jumble of objects and people characterizes the festival of Saint Nicholas in full blow, a passage beginning: “Now the spirit of fun reigned supreme.”46 The spirit of the ideal children’s magazine was to be a holiday spirit. If this spirit bears a resemblance to the carnivalesque, however, Hans Brinker associates it with lavish consumption rather than class resistance. Chapter 9 introduces the Dutch customs surrounding the saint’s distribution of “candies, toys, and treasures.” Devoting a paragraph to a peasant family’s celebration before turning to the “spirit of fun” and its reign in a “grand parlor,” Dodge does not protest or explain Saint Nicholas’s giving lavishly to the wealthy and meagerly to the poor. Instead, she commends the peasant family’s acceptance of their poverty: “a half dollar’s worth will sometimes do for the poor what hundreds of dollars may fail to do for the rich; it makes them happy and grateful, fills them with new peace and love.”47 Dodge has nothing more to say about the peasants’ festival; carnival does not belong to peasants but to the affluent family celebrating at home with no mingling across class boundaries.

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Indeed, in the split structure of Hans Brinker, Dodge heavily overlays bourgeois concerns on the stuff of folklore. A romance of identity underlies the shopping and sightseeing expedition through Dutch culture and history that dominates the novel. The Brinker family’s story, pieced out of familiar folk elements—hidden treasure, buried secrets, tests and tasks— modernizes the topos of a hero’s magic-assisted rise in status, taking place entirely within the middle class. The son of a skilled worker (father Brinker might be a civil engineer in today’s array of occupations) will become a professional, a doctor; the Brinkers’ story represents the middle class’s coming of age, its entering the era of expertise. Dodge does not allow the family unimpeded self-advancement. Raff Brinker suffers a head injury, and his wife and their children, Hans and Gretel (whose very names signal Dodge’s revision of folklore), have endured ten years of poverty when the novel begins—poverty they could have avoided if they knew where Raff buried his substantial savings. With help from a group of wealthy boys whose holiday skating adventure largely overshadows his own part in the novel, Hans summons a famous physician to treat his father. In the crisis that follows Raff Brinker’s brain surgery, Dodge curtails suspense (a practice she later enforced as an editor), resolving narrative crises with quick— and bourgeois—solutions. In chapter 36, Dr. Boekman examines his patient the day after his surgery. He advises Dam Brinker that her husband needs nourishment, but he seems appalled by the food she has at hand and gives her the impression that the patient will die if he does not get finer fare: “You may begin to feed the patient, ahem! not too much, but what you do give him let it be strong and of the best.” “Black bread, we have, mynheer, and porridge,” replied Dam Brinker, cheerily, “they have always agreed with him well.” “Tut! tut!” said the doctor frowning, “nothing of the kind. He must have the juice of fresh meat, white bread, dried and toasted, good Malaga wine, and—ahem!”48

Dodge resolves this crisis within the chapter. By the time Hans has left the house, pondered how to raise enough money, decided to sell a watch that a stranger entrusted to his father’s keeping, and returned home to get it, a young Lady Bountiful and her maid have delivered a basket of food, and the doctor himself has doubled the kindness. Their gifts enable the re-

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mainder of the romance to unfold. Raff recovers, the buried treasure is found, and the watch turns out to belong to Dr. Boekman’s long-lost son, whom Hans replaces as apprentice. The crisis, however fleeting, gives the refinement of taste a crucial role in the Brinker family’s rise. No matter how thrifty and hardworking they are, it is consumption enabled by class condescension, not their own efforts alone, that ultimately changes the Brinkers’ fortunes. Dodge implies that the classic productive values of the work ethic need to be supplemented by gentrified consumption values if the middle class is to advance. The title St. Nicholas which Dodge chose to proclaim the holiday spirit of her children’s periodical offers entry into the cultural history of Christmas, a history that parallels Dodge’s diversion of the carnival spirit to bourgeois childhood. Accounts of the American popular history of Saint Nicholas begin around 1823 with the publication of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.” Whether or not its longstanding attribution to Clement Clarke Moore, a patrician resident of then rural Chelsea in Manhattan, is accurate, the poem’s prominence in the making of Christmas is unquestionable. From the 1830s through the 1850s “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” circulated in broadsides and periodicals with ever-increasing popularity. It was during this time that Christmas “traditions” took their modern, family-centered and commercial form in the United States, a process Nissenbaum chronicles in The Battle for Christmas. In the old world, the premodern year-end festival of misrule had worked to defuse the lower classes’ subversive drives by momentarily reversing class roles; rowdy wassailers would demand service from propertied householders, who would respond with entertainment and gifts. Nissenbaum draws close parallels between winter rites in early modern Europe and on antebellum plantations, with the paternalistic inversion of class roles taking place along the axis of race in the old South. It was during the year-end carnival time that the children in Piatt’s “Child’s Party” would have witnessed black adults dressing in the clothes and parodying the manners of their white owners. Despite the covert subversiveness of such scenes of misrule, however, Christmas on the plantation served to perpetuate slavery and, after emancipation, reconstructions of happy Christmases had much to offer to the mythology of a harmonious old South, glowing with generosity and joy. Nissenbaum highlights Frederick Douglass’s critical take on the Christmas holidays, which he believed to be “the most effective means in the

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hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection.”49 Liquor flowed freely in every quarter during the festival—a version of the early modern wassail that Douglass described as a particularly insidious means of control: slaveholders attached the label “liberty” to an all but coerced drunken binge among slaves, with the object of degrading the very idea of freedom. In industrial areas, early winter, which in agrarian areas was a season of plenty when meat animals were slaughtered, became a time of scarcity when workers were laid off. Winter festivals changed accordingly; rituals of misrule became oppositional popular expressions uncontrolled by church or state. In the urban United States, from the 1830s through the 1850s, remnants of the festival of misrule were disciplined off the streets and into private domestic spaces. Lower-class pranksterism was criminalized and bourgeois children replaced the poor as the objects of their parents’ benevolence. “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” proved a flexible vehicle for consolidating European traditions into a winter festival that overrode the lingering force of the Puritans’ antipathy to saints and revelry; particularly important were the Dutch settlers’ traditions surrounding the celebration of Saint Nicholas Day in early December. Nicholas was a fourth-century Turkish bishop, the patron saint of children, merchants, and sailors, associated with commerce and gift-giving. The image of Saint Nicholas that took hold in the American popular imagination, thanks largely to the poem and the illustrations that accompanied its many publications, was that of a prosperous, jolly, benign peddlar whose wares were free. With his loaded sack of gifts, Saint Nicholas reversed the image of night visitors demanding generosity toward the poor. At the same time, the poem made prosperity and consumption innocent by rendering domestic and unfallen what traces remained of both the old-country saint who judged children and the carnivalesque Lord of Misrule.50 Nissenbaum convincingly rebuts the argument that an otherwise dour and moralistic Moore could not have mustered the jolly language of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.”51 He argues that Moore, like other land-rich New Yorkers, felt under siege as the city developed, and the reinvention of Saint Nicholas belonged to the Knickerbocker project of forging a pseudo-Dutch folk identity as a counterweight to democracy and commerce.52 Nissenbaum notes how the new view of Christmas and the Romantic, Pestalozzian ideal of childhood reinforced one another: the belief that children were fundamentally innocent and

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imaginative (and not selfish or spoiled) was key to masking the commercialism that accompanied the ascent of the domestic Christmas.53 The new Christmas required not only that the poor be kept away from the bourgeois house but also that the children be kept inside, a cultural goal addressed by children’s literature. Dodge’s St. Nicholas followed a three-decade publishing practice of attaching the saint’s image and name to lavishly made children’s books sold as Christmas gifts. Differing from their moralistic precursors, many of these giftbooks substituted for theatergoing—an aspect of the rowdy carnival-style Christmas—by capturing images of theatrical performance, sometimes including Jim Crow figures from blackface minstrelsy, for the quiet domestic pleasure of reading. Nissenbaum notes that such reading was not so much an alternative to misrule as a miniature, internalized version of it, a domesticated, danger-free adventure. “But that,” he adds, “perhaps, has always been the promise of reading itself.”54 For Dodge, the “promise of reading” in this sense constituted the very structure of childhood. As a periodical, Dodge’s St. Nicholas was an ever-renewable giftbook, a year-round forum for the Christmas idea of childhood. In Nissenbaum’s account of the formation of Christmas, Romantic childhood works to organize the competing bourgeois values of genteel domesticity and acquisitive consumerism by containing the subversive energies of carnival. Similarly, for Dodge, childhood—and children’s literature—worked as a forum for negotiating between the values cultivated in genteel women’s culture and the values promoted by the masculinist marketplace and expertise culture. If corporate capitalism repressed attributes marginal to the marketplace, gentility masked the very values that gave bourgeois living its material base. Operating within gentility, Dodge and St. Nicholas worked to build into childhood opportunities to practice individualism and competition. Rather than being subjected to direct moralizing, children were to gather the lessons they would need for adulthood through fictive experiences. While Dodge’s negotiated childhood does offer to gentility some mechanisms of self-criticism and adaptation, it also outlines a specifically bourgeois space, drawing a line between “us” and “them,” those who cannot afford the autonomous space of childhood but whose otherness helps to support the enclosure around those who can.

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The Eagle and the Crow: Fables of Containment The poem of Dodge’s that most vividly illustrates the setting of boundaries around a privileged childhood is “Taking Time to Grow” (fig. 12): “Mamma! mamma!” two eaglets cried, “To let us fly you’ve never tried. We want to go outside and play; We’ll promise not to go away.” The mother wisely shook her head: “No, no, my dears. Not yet,” she said. “But, mother dear,” they called again, “We want to see those things called men, And all the world so grand and gay, Papa described the other day. And—don’t you know?—he told you then About a little tiny wren, That flew about so brave and bold, When it was scarcely four weeks old?” But still the mother shook her head; “No, no, my dears, not yet,” she said. “Before you see the world below, Far bigger you will have to grow. There’s time enough to look for men; And as for wrens—a wren’s a wren. What if your freedom does come late? An eaglet can afford to wait.”

My curiosity about the cultural work that this little poem might do began with a sense that, in situating her eagle family somewhere above perhaps Park Avenue, Dodge collapses and contradicts a rich trove of naturalistic and symbolic lore surrounding eagles. They have borne weighty ideological burdens: in classical mythology Zeus took the form of an eagle to abduct Ganymede, and in heraldry the eagle signified great honor. Eagle poems constitute a virtual subgenre of nineteenth-century American poetry, the eagle’s having been part of the design of the national seal since

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12. A demurely gowned mother eagle sternly forbids her young to follow their father into the ether. Dodge, Rhymes and Jingles 175.

1782. In “The Voice of the Eagle” (1836), Hannah Flagg Gould made the eagle an allegorical national spirit grieving over a national crisis. In “The Captive Eagle” (1839), Eliza Follen turns reflections on the eagle to an abolitionist statement. In “The Sun-Struck Eagle” (1844) by Catherine Ana Warfield and Eleanor Percy Lee, the eagle is a tragic Romantic genius. In Victorian poetry, Tennyson’s “The Eagle, a Fragment” (1851), though only six lines long, captures a vast mythic flight from Romanticism through Victorian naturalism toward modernist paranoia. Christian texts, too—the Bible and Protestant hymnody—abound in eagles, often symbolizing God’s omniscience and might. Two passages especially relevant to the aspects of eagle lore that Dodge contradicts in her

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poem are from a hymn that Moses sings and from Yahweh’s recitation to Job of his terrible creations. Deuteronomy 32:11 compares God’s care of Jacob to a mother eagle’s forcing her children out of the nest and catching them with her wings if they fall while learning to fly. Job 39:27–40 describes an eagle’s making her fortress-like nest and hunting to feed her young: “Her young ones also suck up blood; and where the slain are, there is she.” Dodge’s mother eagle keeps her children in the nest, and there is no mention of the diet on which they are to grow. In children’s literature, animal fables laid the pattern for the narrative and symbolic roles of the eagle. Aesop drew lessons for multiple fables from the eagle’s high nest, child-rearing, flight, vision, and predation. Sarah Josepha Hale’s “The Mole and the Eagle” (1830) has a title like those of Aesop’s fables, but where Aesop drew stories from the contrasting attributes of different animals, Hale effaces the tensions surrounding difference by concluding that the mole’s blindness and the eagle’s wings both represent the goodness of God’s plan. Aesop’s eagles are almost always mothers, but Hale’s eagle is male and her mole female; given that blindness and flight hardly seem “different but equal” attributes, the poem reads as a self-subverting argument for gender conservatism. Another Aesop-like poem, “The Eagle and the Serpent,” translated from the Spanish by William Cullen Bryant, appears in the first volume of St. Nicholas. Like Hale’s poem, “The Eagle and the Serpent” concerns high and low creatures, but no force holds them to their appropriate spheres. The poem contributes to the pages of St. Nicholas a note of paranoia about upward mobility: A serpent saw an eagle gain, On soaring wing, a mountain height, And envied him, and crawled with pain To where he saw the bird alight. So fickle fortune oftentimes Befriends the cunning and the base, And oft the groveling reptile climbs Up to the eagle’s lofty place.55

As for the cultural weight that Dodge’s own nursery rhyme carries, Gannon and Thompson single out “Taking Time to Grow” as having a “sense of detachment” that makes it an exception to the “mawkishly emotional” tone of her poems about children and parents: the eaglets’ “fiercely protec-

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tive mother manages to say no without crushing their ambition.”56 But the ideological structure of “Taking Time to Grow” is far more unstable than this comment implies. The mother and father eagles’ approaches to childrearing work against one another, contesting the nature and length of childhood through the contrary claims of the gendered domestic and public spheres. The father rouses the eaglets’ interest in the “grand and gay” outside world, the world of “things called men,” while the mother enforces the distance between childhood and (masculine) adulthood. The rationale for the poem’s maternally voiced didactic structure comes not from religious precept, as it would in earlier genteel culture, but from difference. The presence of a young wren in the world means that the difference between childhood and adulthood alone cannot contain the eaglets, so the mother uses difference of species. Eaglets are not wrens. In her article on children’s magazines, Dodge recommends language that surprises children “into an electric recognition of comical incongruity.”57 The mother’s reductive explanation, “As for wrens, a wren’s a wren,” is comical because in this poem, of course, a wren is not a wren, nor is an eaglet an eaglet. Who are they, then, and what is the difference? The last line implies that prolonged childhood is an economic privilege: “An eaglet can afford to wait.” Species translates to class. But the eagle is the American emblem; the wren must be non-American, perhaps an immigrant newsboy crying the name of a daily paper on the city streets.58 In associating eagles with postbellum bourgeois childhood, Dodge brings the Romanticism of both eagles and childhood full circle, so that their symbolic values become the opposite of what they once were. Precisely because they are eaglets, they do not fly. Stripping away and contradicting the eagle’s fabled attributes, Dodge leaves sheer size its distinguishing feature. The mother eagle does not merely avoid crushing the eaglets’ ambitions; she inflates them. We see in the mother eagle a late heir to the republican mother, her task now to assure that her children enter the world “far bigger,” with supreme weight and power. The extension of childhood dependency and the implication of national expansionism as a reward for deferring freedom work as mutual supports in the mother’s rationale. At the same time, the mother rationalizes her continuing placement within the nest through her role of defending her aggrandized children against the temptations of lesser freedoms. “What if your freedom does come late?” The language of democratic revolution and emancipation from slavery res-

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onates here in a puzzle about the unfree condition of a life safely elevated above the street, the world, the marketplace. The reason the mother eagle gives for containing her children—“As for wrens, a wren’s a wren”—is nonsense. Rather than explaining anything, it works as a boundary of explanation, compensating for the lack of sense through sound. Stripping the other’s name down to sheer repetitious vocalization, it merges him or her into the forms of oral culture, while at the same time appropriating oral play to reinforce the categorical boundaries that defend the eaglets’ class against transgression. That the boundary containing childhood as Dodge envisioned it took definition from racial as well as national and economic others is evident in the pages of St. Nicholas. Dodge advises her readers, for example, to change “one word” in the rhyming game “Ten Little Niggers” in order to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings; the rhyme then goes, “Ten little black boys went out to dine, / One choked his little self, and then there were nine.”59 Coarse diction, and not racial stereotype or racial hostility, is the problem for Dodge. Another of her own poems, “Poor Crow,” portrays an urban indigent using a species that, since the 1830s, had been associated with blackface minstrel stereotypes: Give me something to eat, Good people, I pray; I have really not had One mouthful to-day! I am hungry and cold, And last night I dreamed A scarecrow had caught me— Good land, how I screamed! Of one little children And six ailing wives (No, one wife and six children), Not one of them thrives. So pity my case, Dear people, I pray; I’m honest, and really I’ve come a long way.

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The ballad stanza appeared commonly in minstrel skits, but if Dodge had minstrelsy in mind when she wrote “Poor Crow,” she masked her source. She avoids dialect in this poem as she did generally in St. Nicholas—part of her editorial nod to genteel taste. Her most obvious departure, again, from earlier genteel verse for children—the kind of poetry that “Mary’s Lamb” exemplifies—is that she neither tells nor models a moral. She does not try to teach children how to treat birds or people. Instead this poem, like “The Way to Do It,” offers its readers opportunities to mimic passions and purposes beyond their experience. “Poor Crow” may help children dismiss the inescapable sights of urban poverty, sights that, like the wren in “Taking Time to Grow,” could destabilize a prolonged, protected childhood. But the crow’s pleading parodies a condition of displacement much like that of migrating freedmen. His language recapitulates several major topoi of the discourses surrounding slavery: the helplessness that defenders of slavery claimed slaves would experience if they were freed; the nightmarish danger that escaped slaves and free blacks alike faced of being taken by slave catchers even in the North; and the confusion of kinship structures imposed by the slave system. “Poor Crow,” like “Taking Time to Grow,” can thus be read as a “meditation on freedom” such as Toni Morrison describes, one that borrows from the racial structure to make nonsense of the exposure accompanying emancipation.60 Racial others were not simply excluded from the kind of childhood envisioned in St. Nicholas; like the nurse in Piatt’s “A Child’s Party,” they were a resource exploited to address the tensions and contradictions enclosed within the implicitly white-centered category of childhood. Begging Adolescence One consequence of the production of childhood as an autonomous category—the belief that the lengthening journey from childhood to adulthood would need a discourse of its own—came of age in the early twentieth century with G. Stanley Hall’s encyclopedic account of adolescence. Hall consolidated the theory that individual development biologically recapitulates the evolution of the human species; for Hall, adolescence repeats the long, traumatic crossing from primitivism into modernity. Disruption and vulnerability pervade this phase of life: “Every step of the upward way is strewn with wreckage of body, mind, and morals,” he writes in the preface to Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology,

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Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (1904). The constant external change that characterizes modernity, as well as the present evolutionary state of the human mind (“late, partial, and perhaps essentially abnormal and remedial”), exposes modern young people to unprecedented threats to normal maturation. Inherited traits alone cannot help children successfully traverse the passage to adulthood, he claims. They need the guidance of experts, and he insists that recapitulation theory alone can provide norms against which to measure developmental deviancy.61 Several aspects of Hall’s view of childhood could have been drawn directly from Dodge’s editorial policies, so closely do they agree. Like Dodge, Hall promotes a moderated realism for children: “The young need to feel by anticipation the great problems of reality, but not so seriously as to endanger losing their souls and the world,” he writes.62 From recapitulation theory he derives guidelines for children’s literature much like Dodge’s. As children repeat the primitive stages of human evolution, they need action and adventure, but modern conditions impose on them sedentary and passive occupations. Children must undertake rote learning to equip themselves for modernity, but to compensate for their alienation from their tribal heritage, children’s stories should provide vicarious experiences of nature and the heroic virtues.63 Hall’s theory also helps to clarify the change that the Romantic idea of childhood underwent during the latter part of the nineteenth century. He accompanies his promotion of realism with a harsh critique of subjective idealism. The objects of interest remain the same as those of Romanticism: “We must go to school to the folk-soul, learn of criminals and defectives.” The difference is that these objects are now to be approached objectively: “Animal, savage, and child-soul can never be studied by introspection.” Hall concurs with Wordsworth that “the child is father to the man” but claims this is scientifically, not metaphysically, true: the child’s immature attributes “are indefinitely older and existed well compacted untold ages before the more distinctly human attributes were developed.” He agrees, too, with Rousseau that, until age twelve, children should be allowed to act out natural “savagery,” but adds the caveat, “if only a proper environment could be provided.”64 The present state of human evolution requires that the “natural” drives of childhood be strictly guided. Hall would also have agreed with Dodge that eaglets—white American children—especially need their passage into adulthood to be prolonged.

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His reasons for regarding American childhood as exceptional derive from his treating nation, ethnicity, and culture as biological factors of evolution. The United States lacked a racial “youth” of its own, a premodern history that its children could recapitulate in order to integrate primitive emotional strength into their adult personalities. Instead, the mongrelization of the white race in a land of immigrants had bred into Americans a teeming abundance of diverging heritages (much like the global realm of the dead in Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”).65 American adolescents thus have unprecedented evolutionary potential that can be actualized during an extended adolescence, but they are equally exposed to great risks of deviancy and developmental failure. This superhuman potential, however, applies only to white Americans. Nonwhite races do not need to prolong adolescence, according to Hall, because their evolution has not progressed to a stage that requires it. Black evolution and therefore black individual development, he asserts, halt at the phase of adolescence.66 Not only Romantic primitivism, but also the claim that “Negroes are naturally of a childlike character”—a claim that undergirded antebellum stereotypes67—takes on a scientific cast in Hall’s handling. Hall and Dodge would have parted ways, subtly but with dramatic consequences, on the significance of gender differences. Dodge does not altogether blur the differences between boys and girls; she does not, for example, think her comical elocution piece “The Way to Do It” is suitable for recitation by a girl, and recommends Thomas Hood’s fanciful “Queen Mab” for the sister of a boy who memorized Dodge’s poem.68 But in some instances, she does at least partially gloss over or transgress the differences between genders. At the end of Hans Brinker, it is Gretel, and not Hans— for whom the reader has been cheering—who wins the silver skates. (Still, Dodge reserves more abstract, moral and professional triumphs for the boy.) And in pieces like “Taking Time to Grow,” Dodge leaves the gender of young characters unspecified, suggesting that the idea of childhood she is advancing applies equally to girls and boys. Not so for Hall. Situating Hall’s thought amid the early twentieth-century masculinist backlash against genteel culture, Gail Bederman emphasizes that he applied his theory of the childhood recapitulation of primitivism only to boys, since he and other evolutionists believed that females made no biological contribution to the advancement of the species.69 Recapitulation theory provided

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Hall with a scientific platform from which to decry the feminization of boys and urge educators to save them from genteel civilization. The science on which he based his pedagogical theory—Lamarck’s idea that learned adaptations were genetically transmitted within species—was already being exposed as a pseudo-science at the time Adolescence was published. By 1911 Hall would turn to eugenics to ground his theory. The discrediting of Lamarckian evolution undermined Hall’s belief that the proper training of American youth could result in a race of supermen. Eugenics allowed him, however, to salvage this hope by taking “primitive” races as models of the virility white men needed in order to overcome the effeminizing effects of gentility.70 A boy’s maturation would successfully progress, then, not through the recapitulation of his own racial history but by integrating developmental benchmarks represented by the supposed evolutionary level of other races. A rare dialect poem in St. Nicholas, “How Persimmons Took Cah ob der Baby,”71 uses Africanist figures to capture a complex moment of transition—one that anticipates tensions surrounding a boy’s coming of age within a feminized cultural framework while serving Dodge’s views about the containment of childhood. The poem was the first publication of Lizzie (Elizabeth) W. Champney, Vassar graduate, daughter of an Ohio judge, and wife of artist J. Wells Champney. Her early poem contrasts in genre and theme to her later career as a popular novelist, which concentrated on Renaissance art and European travel. “How Persimmons Took Cah ob der Baby” tells the story of a black boy who, under the tutelage of his grandmother, tends their white mistress’s child. Two illustrations by Champney’s husband—one of Persimmons rigidly seated in a straightback chair with the baby on his lap and one of his fearsome, glaring grandmother—accompany the poem (figs. 13, 14). Dialect fades in and out of the narrative, sometimes appearing in quotes, as if to signify that the narrator merely imitates colloquial speech to enliven the poem’s diction. Five dialect songs interspersed in the narrative add to the impression that the printed poem mediates between literate and folk language. The songs, in fact, dominate the text; Champney underplays action in favor of quotation, quickly dispensing with dramatic events. As Dodge did in “The Way to Do It,” Champney thus deflects attention from content to form, condensing the historical into the animated body of a child.

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13. Persimmons on the job. St. Nicholas 1 (May, 1874): 420.

Born in a northern border state in 1850, Champney would have known slavery from a short distance, and the events leading up to emancipation would have made inescapable news during her late childhood. Nothing in Persimmons’s story makes clear whether it is set within slavery or after emancipation, but the central event, a cataclysmic flood, parallels the Civil War’s destruction of the old South. The grandmother saves the missus, the baby, Persimmons, and herself by making a raft of the verandah roof. With no paternal passengers, the raft is a miniature community of women and children, a microcosm of the world antebellum women’s literary culture had addressed; fathers are dispersed elsewhere in the poem, appearing as iconic names and hostile civic officials. The raft splits in half, separating

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the boy and the baby from the two maternal figures. Adrift on a river at night, Persimmons enacts the recurring American scene of a passage by water into freedom, opportunity, and individuation; Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) especially seems anticipated in Persimmons’s exploits. In the end, however, Champney does not allow him to light out on his own. Persistent in his duty, he wanders from place to place carrying the baby until “some City Fathers” have him arrested for vagrancy.

14. Granny. St. Nicholas 1 (May, 1874): 421.

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He escapes, rescues the baby from the “’sylum,” and is finally reunited with the baby’s mother and his grandmother, who upbraids him: “Whar you done been wid baby?” Persimmons’s story clearly offers a vicarious adventure, just as Dodge (and later Hall) prescribed, but Champney’s uses of racial stereotype and dialect songs lace the poems with ironies, giving it a tone sometimes indecipherably split between didacticism and mocking satire. The young white readers of St. Nicholas must identify with a black child; the white characters enact a narrative of helpless dependency that must remain at least partially suppressed if the readers are to share in Persimmons’s agency. As he is first introduced, Persimmons might be one of the exemplary innocents of sentimental didacticism: Persimmons was a colored lad ’Way down in Lou’sianny, And all the teaching that he had Was given him by his granny. But he did his duty ever As well as you, it may be; With faithfulness and pride always, He minded missus’ baby. (ll. 1–8)

Champney undercuts sentimental portraiture by giving Persimmons faults, but they are faults drawn from popular black stereotypes: He loved the counsels of the saints, And, sometimes, those of sinners, To run off ’possum-hunting and Steal “water-milion” dinners. (ll. 9–12)

This stereotypical shiftlessness complicates the tone of the subsequent passage, which tells of Persimmons’s fervent participation in religious gatherings. Singing the “rudest melodies” like an angel, is Persimmons sympathetic, ludicrous, or both? Is the child reader meant to sustain identification with Persimmons despite these ambiguities of tone? Champney inserts a mock spiritual that Persimmons has learned at camp meetings: “We be nearer to de Lord Dan de white folks,—and dey knows it.

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See de glory-gate unbarred,— Walk in, darkies, past de guard,— Bet you dollar He won’t close it. “Walk in, darkies, troo de gate, Hear de kullered angels holler; Go ’way, white folks, you’re too late, We’s de winnin’ kuller. Wait Till de trumpet blow to foller.” (ll. 21–31)

The song echoes abolitionist millennialism, particularly the saintliness of a figure like Stowe’s Uncle Tom, but it also captures Reconstruction-era white anxieties that the end of slavery meant the defeat of the white race and that free blacks aspired to racial domination. Set in Persimmons’s story, however, these threats seem harmless. The song’s declaration of white inferiority might work ironically to distance the young white reader who “knows” the views expressed are mistaken; if this occurs, Persimmons becomes a quaint exotic over whom the reader may feel superior. In more complex ways, however, the song guides the reader’s identification by undercutting the racial structure. Knowing that Persimmons believes himself spiritually triumphant over whites, the reader need not ponder the state of servitude that Persimmons’s taking care of the baby represents. A white reader unambivalently enjoying the song would merge his child-self into blackness, allowing the racial cues in the story to figure childhood—the rustic, naive, spiritually heightened childhood of the Romantic ideal; Champney’s Africanism helps to construct the identification Hall would later promote between white childhood and other-raced “primitives.” Persimmons and the baby are doubles, with the racial difference between them signifying the difference between the active childhood cultivated through Dodge’s genteel “realism” and the accompanying dependency that must be both prolonged and repressed. The grandmother and the white mistress, too, are doubles, similarly structuring the difference between maternal authority and female helplessness through race. As a giver of instruction, the grandmother has republican mothers and the didactic voices of antebellum women’s culture as her precursors, but the premodern crone who orally transmits culture is present in her as well. While she shares the occupation of Piatt’s nurse and Harper’s Aunt Chloe, the illustration distances her far from the benignly domestic

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Mammy stereotype: she is Sapphire, the prototype for Gelett Burgess’s orally aggressive purple cow (fig. 14). Her open, toothy mouth associates her with devouring as well as speaking. Gripping her broom, she looks like a fairy-tale witch. In the text, she wields more sinister instruments: an axe and a lever. Although she uses these weapons to save a white woman and child, the fearsome instrumentality Champney gives her also carries an insistent denial that she is disempowered. In a more abrasive guise, Persimmons’s granny thus serves a function analogous to that of Piatt’s nurse: invested with a power of her own, she redeems white childhood and femininity and blocks the view of the workings of raced and gendered hierarchies. Sapphire’s role is to undercut male trickster figures. K. Sue Jewell writes that her very existence “is predicated upon the presence of the corrupt African American male” whose tricksterism gives her the occasion to emasculate him.72 Her function in the post-emancipation configuration of black stereotypes, then, is to expose the black male’s unfitness for citizenship. Granny plays a similar role for Persimmons, cornering him into an impossibly paradox-ridden identity. Champney gives granny a song—the one Persimmons hears most often—that repeats with three variations like the magical chants in folktales. The repetition makes the granny’s command over Persimmons’s identity and control of his actions a prominent theme of the poem. Her instructions vary, but she names him the same way each time: “Jawge Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Persimmons, Henry Clay . . .”

The missing patriarch appears here multiplied. The names of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, national icons, overstate Persimmons’s Americanness, despite the undisclosed irony of their both having been slaveholders. Henry Clay carries a more specific freight. His name provides a syncopated rhyme for “baby” in the instructions granny issues, thus assuring that each command will be about Persimmons’s single duty: . . . Henry Clay, be Quick, shut de do’, Get up off dat flo’, Come heah and mind de baby.” (ll. 38–41)

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But the name of the Great Pacificator—an architect of the Compromise of 1850—also imports into granny’s naming of Persimmons a spirit of accommodation over the racial structure. Further, since the compromise strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act, his very name implies the futility of any attempt on Persimmons’s part to seek emancipation—even less, enfranchisement in the goods of white history implied by his two presidential names. Inserting among these linguistic relics her hero’s “true” name, the name of a plump, fleshy, orange-red fruit, Champney withdraws the presidents from cause and consequence and sets her hero’s identity in a space of lusciousness, of consumption, of nonsense. Persimmons sings a second “rude camp-meeting anthem” after escaping from prison and recovering the baby. Its images are borrowed from spirituals concerned with the hope of freedom: “Moses smote de water, and De sea gabe away; De chilleren dey passed ober, for De sea gabe away, O Lord! I feel so glad, It am always dark ’fo’ day, So, honey, don’t yer be sad, De sea’ll gib away.” (ll. 104–12)

But Persimmons is not fleeing slavery. Like a proper trickster, he handily eludes the official authorities, but he does so in order to fulfill the duty granny has hammered into his head, so his tricksterism involves compliance as well as resistance. Further, his adventure begins with his accidental separation from the community of women and children, not by his own agency, and the duty to which he adheres through all adversity, taking care of the baby, pertains to the community from which he has been separated. Dodge would have approved of the way that Champney curtails Persimmons’s adventure and postpones his emancipation from childhood, restoring him and, by proxy, the reader to gendered, generational control after their excursion through city streets. But Hall would have been appalled by the feminization of Persimmons through the task of child care and the indomitable rule of granny. If Champney’s tale forecasts Hall’s embrace of other-raced models of masculinity for white youth, Persimmons represents the problem Hall meant to address through such figures rather than the solution.

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More problematic within the framework of Dodge’s editorial views, granny’s naming song undercuts the triumph that a young adventurer should enjoy for fulfilling his duty. Racially, granny’s role is conservative and counters the impulses voiced in the mock spiritual by keeping Persimmons in his place of dutiful service. She also, however, works to block his maturation. Like Mary’s lamb, Persimmons and his infant double successfully endure separation from their maternal objects; and like the three kittens, he masters the care of an object for which he is responsible. Unlike the mother cat, however, granny does not let up her scolding tone even at the end. Rather than recognizing his achievements, she comes close to accusing Persimmons of abducting the baby, shaking him as she cries: “You, Jawge Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Persimmons, Henry Clay, be Quick, splain yerself, chile,— Stop dat ar fool smile,— Whar you done been wid baby?” (ll. 121–6)

If, as a didactic figure—or even a proxy adventurer—Persimmons models faithfulness to duty, the granny’s song ironizes that lesson as she draws Persimmons back under her control. He is Sapphire’s target despite his faithfulness. He cannot do right. Granny’s final variation brings Persimmons back to where he began and strips his activity of its purposefulness. In this guise, Champney’s black maternal figure presages the castrating black matriarch of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965).73 The poem’s ending raises questions: Is Persimmons’s caring for the baby sense or nonsense? Has he been skillful or incompetent? Has his rigid adherence to his granny’s rule been work or play?74 The poem’s unstable tone owes much to the difference it makes, in addressing these questions as we read it today, whether we place them in a frame of racial history or one of children’s literature. Stewart writes that intentional incompetence in nonsense gives information about the processes by which mistakes and correct actions are differentiated. The “nonsense” of granny’s song shows how the internal logic of naming can reconstruct emancipation as a “mistake” on the part of the subject who is being named. Depending on the frame, this

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“mistake” in Champney’s narrative is either a child’s early foray into autonomy or a race’s release from slavery. Granny’s song is not just unpleasantly disciplinary, and identification with Persimmons is not the only source of adventure that the poem offers. There is also the aural adventurousness of the songs. Learning and repeating the naming rhyme, a child would master an adult voice infused with something like magic. The voice would imperiously direct its listener to tend to the infantile anxiety roused by separation from mother: take care of baby. While Persimmons’s wanderings address childhood’s supposed need for action and adventure, the granny’s song gives voice to a rage and hunger associated with containing, directing, and controlling childhood activity. Like Piatt’s nurse, Persimmons’s granny thus helps to make poetry possible. Consuming both Persimmons and his granny through her naming rhyme, the child reader would introject command over self. But together with the folk crone’s fierce, enchanting discipline, he would take in a rationale for elaborating the paradoxes of free, white identity through the imaginary of literary blackness. Individual developmental psychology alone cannot account for the displacement of infant rage onto the figure of a black crone. As I pointed out early in this chapter, adults’ temporal regression in constructing childhood is historical as well as individual, and as Piatt’s “Child’s Party” clearly shows, Africanist figures may contain a white subject’s desires and rages arising from a now-marginalized or repressed awareness of having been constructed white in relation to the debates and structures surrounding race. As in Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert’s sewing idyll in Loew’s Bridge, this subject-raced-white would be drawn to Africanist children and childhood for their capacity to reflect back the white subject’s desire to be innocent of the racial structure even as she accepts its benefits. In different ways, Persimmons’s two camp songs also appropriate literary blackness for problems of whiteness. The superiority song, “We be nearer to de Lord,” sounds like parody, but the freedom song, “Moses smote de water,” could easily be an authentic biblical quotation. Both songs take part in what Stewart identifies as a defining gesture of nonsense: the ironic opening of a wound between discourse and the world, the transposition of language from one to another contextual frame. Champney strips these songs of the wide historical context to which they refer—the racial struc-

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ture—and, publishing Persimmons’s story in St. Nicholas, resets them in the frame of white, bourgeois childhood. The displacement of referential materials from their historical frame, the repetition of language stripped of meaning, the closing off of action from purpose—all of these moves work toward a metafictional setting of boundaries around an autonomous category. Inescapably, in Champney’s poem, the content of the category being defined as socially purposeless shifts between childhood and African American life. Instrumental in making the Africanist figure “wholly available” (in Toni Morrison’s words) to white literary discourses of childhood in the 1870s was the antebellum stereotype which fed both proslavery paternalism and antislavery visions of the meek inheriting the earth: “Negroes are naturally of a childlike character.”75 Like Lambert, who wrote Loew’s Bridge just two years later, Champney enters the literature of race at a time of pause or dispersal in the white production of black stereotypes. Their circulation to support or oppose slavery had ended, and the nostalgic plantation tradition (and the simultaneously beginning “nadir,” the era of antiblack terrorism) had not yet become established. Champney’s contribution shows how debates about race could be submerged into a blankness even as their traces were gathered to fulfill the promise of reading and give literate childhood its form: experiencing adventure while going nowhere and remaining safe. Modeling vicarious adventure in an adventure that itself turns unreal by ending with granny’s negation, Persimmons acts out an allegory of autonomy and its boundaries, its being, like nonsense, “good for nothing.”76 “In nonsense,” Stewart writes, “hierarchies of relevance are flattened, inverted, and manipulated in a gesture that questions the idea of hierarchy itself—a gesture that celebrates an arbitrary and impermanent hierarchy.”77 As well as this description applies to much of Persimmons’s story, in featuring Africanist characters while repressing the context of racial history, Champney shows how the racial structure could modernize itself, adapting to the falling away of its official sanctions by taking hold, with carnival, of internal and individual dream-spaces. • • • •

Stewart writes, “Nonsense becomes appropriate only to the everyday discourse of the socially purposeless, to those on the peripheries of everyday life: the infant, the child, the mad and the senile, the chronically foolish

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and playful.”78 Nonsense encompasses the objects of Romantic interest and those Hall thought must be studied in order to establish scientific norms of human development. The list takes us back to Follen’s pairing of nonsense with abolitionism, and the shaping of refuge for the self out of advocacy for the other’s freedom. Nonsense, informed by Romanticism, allows for the representability of categorical violations and confusions. While a strict reinforcement of categorical boundaries may push the other toward unrepresentability, as it does in the whiteness of Mary’s lamb, the development of nonsense as an autonomous space allows for the reification of stereotypes of the other as signs of nonsense’s own transgressive processes. Are stereotypes nonsense? Are they reified artifacts of “play,” abducted from one contextual frame to another, another, and another? If they are, then it is a nonsense that works as many suspect the slapstick violence in cartoons works: it escapes its separate cultural refuse yard to penetrate the real world of bodies, discipline, pain, and power. During Women’s History Month, in March of 1998, I heard Carrie Mae Weems lecture about her photographic confrontations with black stereotypes. She spoke of them as folklore and said, “We must learn to love our stereotypes.” The slide on the screen showed a young black woman in a slip holding a mirror, that reflected back a stern alter-self dressed, fairy-godmother-style, in white gauze. The caption read: “looking into the mirror, the black woman asked, “mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the finest of them all?” the mirror says, “snow white you black bitch, and don’t you forget it!!!”

Weems repeated: “We must learn to love our stereotypes.”79 I found Weems’s statement mysterious then, as I do now, although I recognize better today the rich burden of scrambled information that stereotypes bear. If nonsense has something to tell us about the artifacts of race and time, can it be taken out of its closet under the stairs and mobilized as a critical tool in the work of recovering our discomforting histories? In the late 1970s, the moment in literary scholarship to which Stewart’s work on nonsense belongs, feminist and black studies had begun to assert the liberatory force of content, and formalism, exchanging energies with the new activist disciplines, had restlessly seized its tail between its teeth. Stewart’s work everywhere resonates with poststructuralism’s familiar faith in the lib-

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eratory energies of nonsense, of devouring forms, breaking frames, exposing constructions. It is a well-placed faith, except that, in the ethical and political fruit they bear, the content of furious green ideas can make all the difference. We must learn to love our stereotypes: worlds of difference occupy this “our” as I, a (white) (woman) scholar, take it up and offer it to readers of these last pages. “My” raced stereotypes are those that have been treated as though they were not raced, those that correspond to the subject of American women’s poetry when the structure of race is not centralized in defining the field. “My” disempowering gendered stereotypes are descended from those that govern lyric subjects who turned to unnamed racial others for validation, liberation, and love—for the shaping of play spaces where the structure of inequality vanishes or appears only in dreamy, dehistoricized fragments. We love our stereotypes—“brown, red, or white”—not by taking comfort in them or expecting them to free us but by attending deeply to their traces of parts of our selves emerging and re-emerging from the landscape of the void. So this study of race and time cannot end with the promise of progressive outcomes for category-subverting play. The paradox for activist pedagogy and scholarship working at the boundaries of social categories is that we must not stop and simply allow the boundaries to reify, but that our keeping them in play guarantees nothing about their social outcomes. Play will not abolish the lived experience of race in time. Nonsense, Stewart writes, “refuses the uplifting note by which the world assumes a happy ending.”80

APPENDIX Poems Cited

Chapter • 3 Elizabeth Margaret Chandler The Kneeling Slave

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Pity the negro, lady! her’s is not, Like thine, a blessed and most happy lot! Thou, shelter’d ’neath a parent’s tireless care, The fondly loved, the theme of many a prayer, Blessing, and blest, amidst thy circling friends, Whose love repays the joys thy presence lends, Tread’st gaily onward, o’er thy path of flowers, With ceaseless summer lingering round thy bowers. But her—the outcast of a frowning fate, Long weary years of servile bondage wait. Her lot uncheer’d by hope’s reviving gale, The lowest in life’s graduated scale— The few poor hours of bliss that cheer her still, Uncertain pensioners on a master’s will— ’Midst ceaseless toils renew’d from day to day, She wears in bitter tears her life away. She is thy sister, woman! shall her cry, Uncared for, and unheeded, pass thee by? Wilt thou not weep to see her rank so low, And seek to raise her from her place of woe? Or has thy heart grown selfish in its bliss, That thou shouldst view unmoved a fate like this? The Genius of Universal Emancipation, 3d Series, 1 (May 1830): 41.

Sarah Louise Forten An Appeal to Women

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Oh, woman, woman, in thy brightest hour Of conscious worth, of pride, of conscious power Oh, nobly dare to act a Christian’s part, That well befits a lovely woman’s heart! Dare to be good, as thou canst dare be great; Despise the taunts of envy, scorn and hate;

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A p pe n d i x Our ‘skins may differ,’ but from thee we claim A sister’s privilege, in a sister’s name.

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We are thy sisters,—God has truly said, That of one blood, the nations he has made. Oh, christian woman, in a christian land, Canst thou unblushing read this great command? Suffer the wrongs which wring our inmost heart To draw one throb of pity on thy part; Our ‘skins may differ,’ but from thee we claim A sister’s privilege, in a sister’s name. Oh, woman!—though upon thy fairer brow The hues of roses and of lilies glow— These soon must wither in their kindred earth, From whence the fair and dark have equal birth. Let a bright halo o’er thy virtues shed A lustre, that shall live when thou art dead; Let coming ages learn to bless thy name Upon the altar of immortal fame. The Liberator, February 1, 1834

Frances E. W. Harper The Slave Mother Heard you that shriek? It rose So wildly on the air, It seemed as if a burden’d heart Was breaking in despair. 5

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Saw you those hands so sadly clasped— The bowed and feeble head— The shuddering of that fragile form— That look of grief and dread? Saw you the sad, imploring eye? Its every glance was pain,

Po e m s C i t e d As if a storm of agony Were sweeping through the brain.

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She is a mother, pale with fear, Her boy clings to her side, And in her kirtle vainly tries His trembling form to hide. He is not hers, although she bore For him a mother’s pains; He is not hers, although her blood Is coursing through his veins! He is not hers, for cruel hands May rudely tear apart The only wreath of household love That binds her breaking heart.

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His love has been a joyous light That o’er her pathway smiled, A fountain gushing ever new, Amid life’s desert wild. His lightest word has been a tone Of music round her heart, Their lives a streamlet blent in one— Oh, Father! must they part? They tear him from her circling arms, Her last and fond embrace. Oh! never more may her sad eyes Gaze on his mournful face. No marvel, then, these bitter shrieks Disturb the listening air; She is a mother, and her heart Is breaking in despair. 1854

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A p pe n d i x Hannah Flagg Gould The Slave Mother’s Prayer O Thou, who hear’st the feeblest prayer, The humblest heart dost see, Upon the chilly midnight air I pour my soul to thee!

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I bend a form with ceaseless toil Consuming all the day; And raise an eye that wets the soil, As wears my life away. I lift a hand that’s only freed Until to-morrow’s task; But how, O God, does nature bleed Upon the boon I ask! How wretched must that mother be, (And I’m the hapless one,) Who begs an early grave of thee, To shield her only son! I would not that my boy were spared To curse his natal hour; To drag the chains his birth prepared Beneath unfeeling power. Then, ere the nursling at my breast Shall feel the tyrant’s rod, O lay his little form at rest Beneath the quiet sod!

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And when before thine awful throne My master shall appear, A naked spirit, to atone For all his dealings here; If pardoning grace can be bestowed, And Heaven has pity then,

Po e m s C i t e d For him, who here no pity showed Towards his fellow-men,

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Thou’lt spare him, in thy mercy, Lord, The sinner’s fearful doom— The wages, for his just reward, Of death beyond the tomb. 1832

Chapter • 4 Hannah Flagg Gould The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy

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And now, Mistress Mummy, since thus you’ve been found By the world, that has long done without you, In your snug little hiding-place far under ground— Be pleased to speak out, as we gather around, And let us hear something about you!

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By the style of your dress you are not Madam Eve— You of course had a father and mother; No more of your line have we power to conceive, As you furnish us nothing by which to believe You had husband, child, sister, or brother.

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We know you have lived, though we cannot tell when, And that too by eating and drinking, To judge by your teeth, and the lips you had then; And we see you are one of the children of men, Though long from their looks you’ve been shrinking.

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Who was it that made you a cavern so deep, Refused your poor head a last pillow, And bade you sit still when you’d sunken to sleep, And they’d bound you and muffled you up in a heap Of clothes made of hempen and willow?

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A p pe n d i x Say, whose was the ear that could hear with delight The musical trinket found nigh you? And who had the eye that was pleased with the sight Of this form (whose queer face might be brown, red, or white,) Trick’d out in the jewels kept by you? 1836

Chapter • 5 Sarah Piatt A Child’s Party (in Kentucky, A.D. 185_) Before my cheeks were fairly dry, I heard my dusky playmate say: ‘Well, now your mother’s in the sky, And you can always have your way. 5

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‘Old Mistress has to stay, you know, And read the Bible in her room. —Let’s have a party! Will you, though?’ Ah, well, the whole world was in bloom. ‘A party would be fine, and yet— There’s no one here I can invite.’ ‘Me and the children.’ ‘You forget—’ ‘Oh, please, pretend that I am white.’ I said, and think of it with shame, ‘Well, when it’s over, you’ll go back There to the cabin all the same, And just remember you are black. ‘I’ll be the lady, for, you see, I’m pretty,’ I serenely said. ‘The black folk say that you would be If—if your hair just wasn’t red.’

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Our quarrel ended. At our feet A faint-green blossoming carpet lay, By some strange chance, divinely sweet, Just shaken on that gracious day. Into the lonesome parlour we Glided, and from the shuddering wall Bore, in its antique majesty, The gilded mirror dim and tall. And then a woman, painted by Ignotus, doubtless, tired and fair, From her unhappy place on high, Went with us—just to take the air! Next the quaint candlesticks we took: Their waxen tapers every one We lighted, to see how they’d look;— A strange sight, surely, in the sun! Then, with misgiving, we undid The secret closet by the stair;— There, with patrician dust half-hid, My ancestors, in china, were.

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(Hush, child, this splendid tale is true!) Were one of these on earth to-day, You’d know right well my blood was blue;— You’d own I was not common clay! There too, long hid from eyes of men, A shining sight we two did see. Oh, there was solid silver then In this poor hollow world—ah me!

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A p pe n d i x We spread the carpet. By a great Grey tree we let the mirror stare, While graven spoon and pictured plate Were wildly scattered here and there. And then our table: thereon gleamed, Adorned with many an apple-bud, Foam-frosted, dainty things that seemed— Not made of most delicious mud! Next came our dressing. As to that, I had the fairiest shoes (on each Were four gold buttons!), and a hat And plume like blushes of the peach.

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But there was my dark, elfish guest Still standing shabby in her place;— How could I use her to show best My own transcendent bloom and grace? ‘You’ll be my grandmama,’ I sighed, After much thought, somewhat in fear. She, joyous, to her sisters cried: ‘Call me Old Mistress!—do you hear?’ About that little slave’s weird face And rude, round form I fastened all My grandmama’s most awful lace, And grandmama’s most sacred shawl. Then one last sorrow came to me: ‘I didn’t think of it before. But at a party there should be One gentleman, I think, or more.’ ‘There’s Uncle Sam, you might ask him.’ I looked, and, in an ancient chair, Sat a bronze grey-beard, still and grim On Sundays called Old Brother Blair.

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Above his book his brows were bent; It was his pride, as I had heard, To study the New Testament (In which he could not spell one word). ‘Oh, he is not a gentleman,’ I said with my Caucasian scorn. ‘He is,’ replied the African: ‘He is. He’s quit a-ploughin’ corn. ‘He got so old they set him free. He preaches now, you ought to know. I tell you we are proud when he Eats dinner at our cabin, though.’ ‘Well—ask him!’ Lo, he raised his head. His voice was shaken and severe: ‘Here, Sisters in the Church,’ he said, ‘Here—for old Satan’s sake, come here! ‘That white child’s done put on her best Silk bonnet. (It looks like a rose!) And this black little imp is dressed In all Old Mistress’ finest clothes.

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‘Come, look! They’ve got the parlour glass, And all the silver, too. Come, look! (Such plates as these here on the grass!’) And Uncle Sam shut up his book. The priestess of the eternal flame That warmed our Southern kitchen hearth Rushed out. The housemaid with her came Who swept the cobwebs from the earth. Then there was one bent to the ground;— Her hair, than lilies not less white, With a bright handkerchief was crowned; Her lovely face was weird as night.

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A p pe n d i x I felt the flush of sudden pride;— The others soon grew still with awe, For, standing bravely at my side, My mother’s nurse and mine they saw. ‘Who blamed my child?’ she said. ‘It makes My heart ache when they trouble you. —Here’s a whole basketful of cakes, And I’ll come to the party too!’ . . .

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Tears made of dew were in my eyes (These after-tears are made of brine): No sweeter soul is in the skies Than hers, my mother’s nurse and mine. 1883/95

Chapter • 6 Frances Harper Aunt Chloe I remember, well remember, That dark and dreadful day, When they whispered to me, “Chloe, Your children’s sold away! 5

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It seemed as if a bullet Had shot me through and through, And I felt as if my heart-strings Was breaking right in two. And I says to cousin Milly, “There must be some mistake; Where’s Mistus?” “In the great house crying— Crying like her heart would break. “And the lawyer’s there with Mistus; Says he’s come to ’ministrate,

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’Cause when master died he just left Heap of debt on the estate. “And I thought ’twould do you good To bid your boys good-bye— To kiss them both and shake their hands, And have a hearty cry. “Oh! Chloe, I knows how you feel, ’Cause I’se been through it all; I thought my poor old heart would break, When master sold my Soul.”

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Just then I heard the footsteps Of my children at the door, And then I rose right up to meet them, But I fell upon the floor. And I heard poor Jakey saying, “Oh, mammy, don’t you cry!” And I felt my children kiss me And bid me, both, good-bye. Then I had a mighty sorrow, Though I nursed it all alone; But I wasted to a shadow, And turned to skin and bone. But one day dear uncle Jacob (In Heaven he’s now a saint) Said, “Your poor heart is in the fire, But child you must not faint.” Then I said to uncle Jacob, If I was good like you, When the heavy trouble dashed me I’d know just what to do.

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Then he said to me, “Poor Chloe, The way is open wide:”

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A p pe n d i x And he told me of the Saviour, And the fountain in His side.

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Then he said, “Just take your burden To the blessed Master’s feet; I takes all my troubles, Chloe, Right unto the mercy-seat.” His words waked up my courage, And I began to pray, And I felt my heavy burden Rolling like a stone away. And a something seemed to tell me, You will see your boys again— And that hope was like a poultice Spread upon a dreadful pain. And it often seemed to whisper, Chloe, trust and never fear; You’ll get justice in the kingdom, If you do not get it here. The Deliverance Master only left old Mistus One bright and handsome boy; But she fairly doted on him, He was her pride and joy.

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We all liked Mister Thomas, He was so kind at heart; And when the young folks got in scrapes, He always took their part. He kept right on that very way Till he got big and tall, And old Mistus used to chide him And say he’d spile us all.

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But somehow the farm did prosper When he took things in hand; And though all the servants liked him, He made them understand. One evening Mister Thomas said, “Just bring my easy shoes; I am going to sit by mother, And read her up the news.” Soon I heard him tell old Mistus “We’re bound to have a fight; But we’ll whip the Yankees, mother, We’ll whip them sure as night!”

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Then I saw old Mistus tremble; She gasped and held her breath; And she looked on Mister Thomas With a face as pale as death. “They are firing on Fort Sumpter; Oh! I wish that I was there!— Why, dear mother! what’s the matter? You’re the picture of despair.” “I was thinking, dearest Thomas, ’Twould break my very heart If a fierce and dreadful battle Should tear our lives apart.” “None but cowards, dearest mother, Would skulk unto the rear, When the tyrant’s hand is shaking All the heart is holding dear.” I felt sorry for old Mistus; She got too full to speak; But I saw the great big tear-drops A running down her cheek.

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A p pe n d i x Mister Thomas too was troubled With choosing on that night, Betwixt staying with his mother And joining in the fight. Soon down into the village came A call for volunteers; Mistus gave up Mister Thomas, With many sighs and tears. His uniform was real handsome; He looked so brave and strong; But somehow I could’nt help thinking His fighting must be wrong. Though the house was very lonesome, I thought ’twould all come right, For I felt somehow or other We was mixed up in that fight. And I said to Uncle Jacob, “How old Mistus feels the sting, For this parting with your children Is a mighty dreadful thing.”

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“Never mind,” said Uncle Jacob, “Just wait and watch and pray, For I feel right sure and certain, Slavery’s bound to pass away; “Because I asked the Spirit, If God is good and just, How it happened that the masters Did grind us to the dust. “And something reasoned right inside, Such should not always be; And you could not beat it out my head, The Spirit spoke to me.”

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And his dear old eyes would brighten, And his lips put on a smile, Saying, “Pick up faith and courage, And just wait a little while.” Mistus prayed up in the parlor, That the Secesh all might win; We were praying in the cabins, Wanting freedom to begin.

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Mister Thomas wrote to Mistus, Telling ’bout the Bull’s Run fight, That his troops had whipped the Yankees And put them all to flight. Mistus’ eyes did fairly glisten; She laughed and praised the South, But I thought some day she’d laugh On tother side her mouth. I used to watch old Mistus’ face And when it looked quite long I would say to Cousin Milly, The battle’s going wrong; Not for us, but for the Rebels.— My heart would fairly skip, When Uncle Jacob used to say, “The North is bound to whip.” And let the fight go as it would— Let North or South prevail— He always kept his courage up, And never let it fail.

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And he often used to tell us, “Children, don’t forget to pray; For the darkest time of morning Is just ’fore the break of day.”

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A p pe n d i x Well, one morning bright and early We heard the fife and drum, And the booming of the cannon— The Yankee troops had come. When the word ran through the village, The colored folks are free— In the kitchens and the cabins We held a jubilee. When they told us Mister Lincoln Said that slavery was dead, We just poured our prayers and blessings Upon his precious head. We just laughed, and danced, and shouted And prayed, and sang, and cried, And we thought dear Uncle Jacob Would fairly crack his side.

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But when old Mistus heard it, She groaned and hardly spoke; When she had to lose her servants, Her heart was almost broke. ’Twas a sight to see our people Going out, the troops to meet, Almost dancing to the music, And marching down the street. After years of pain and parting, Our chains was broke in two, And we was so mighty happy, We did’nt know what to do. But we soon got used to freedom, Though the way at first was rough; But we weathered through the tempest, For slavery made us tough.

Po e m s C i t e d But we had one awful sorrow, It almost turned my head, When a mean and wicked cretur Shot Mister Lincoln dead. 145

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’Twas a dreadful solemn morning, I just staggered on my feet; And the women they were crying And screaming in the street. But if many prayers and blessings Could bear him to the throne, I should think when Mister Lincoln died, That heaven just got its own. Then we had another President,— What do you call his name? Well, if the colored folks forget him They would’nt be much to blame. We thought he’d be the Moses Of all the colored race; But when the Rebels pressed us hard He never showed his face. But something must have happened him, Right curi’s I’ll be bound, ’Cause I heard ’em talking ’bout a circle That he was swinging round.

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But everything will pass away— He went like time and tide— And when the next election came They let poor Andy slide. But now we have a President, And if I was a man I’d vote for him for breaking up The wicked Ku-Klux Klan.

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A p pe n d i x And if any man should ask me If I would sell my vote, I’d tell him I was not the one To change and turn my coat; If freedom seem’d a little rough I’d weather through the gale; And as to buying up my vote, I hadn’t it for sale. I do not think I’d ever be As slack as Jonas Handy; Because I heard he sold his vote For just three sticks of candy.

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But when John Thomas Reeder brought His wife some flour and meat, And told he had sold his vote For something good to eat, You ought to seen Aunt Kitty raise, And heard her blaze away; She gave the meat and flour a toss, And said they should not stay. And I should think he felt quite cheap For voting the wrong side; And when Aunt Kitty scolded him, He just stood up and cried. But the worst fooled man I ever saw, Was when poor David Rand Sold out for flour and sugar; The sugar was mixed with sand. I’ll tell you how the thing got out; His wife had company, And she thought the sand was sugar, And served it up for tea.

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When David sipped and sipped the tea, Somehow it didn’t taste right; I guess when he found he was sipping sand He was mad enough to fight. The sugar looked so nice and white— It was spread some inches deep— But underneath was a lot of sand; Such sugar is mighty cheap. You’d laughed to seen Lucinda Grange Upon her husband’s track; When he sold his vote for rations She made him take ’em back. Day after day did Milly Green Just follow after Joe, And told him if he voted wrong To take his rags and go. I think that Samuel Johnson said His side had won the day, Had not we women radicals Just got right in the way.

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And yet I would not have you think That all our men are shabby; But ’tis said in every flock of sheep There will be one that’s scabby. I’ve heard, before election came They tried to buy John Slade; But he gave them all to understand That he wasn’t in that trade. And we’ve got lots of other men Who rally round the cause, And go for holding up the hands That gave us equal laws,

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A p pe n d i x Who know their freedom cost too much Of blood and pain and treasure, For them to fool away their votes For profit or for pleasure. Aunt Chloe’s Politics Of course, I don’t know very much About these politics, But I think that some who run ’em, Do mighty ugly tricks.

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I’ve seen ’em honey-fugle round, And talk so awful sweet, That you’d think them full of kindness As an egg is full of meat. Now I don’t believe in looking Honest people in the face, And saying when you’re doing wrong, That ‘I haven’t sold my race.’ When we want to school our children, If the money isn’t there, Whether black or white have took it, The loss we all must share. And this buying up each other Is something worse than mean, Though I thinks a heap of voting, I go for voting clean. Learning to Read Very soon the Yankee teachers Came down and set up school; But, oh! how the Rebs did hate it,— It was agin’ their rule.

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Our masters always tried to hide Book learning from our eyes;

Po e m s C i t e d Knowledge did’nt agree with slavery— ’Twould make us all too wise.

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But some of us would try to steal A little from the book, And put the words together, And learn by hook or crook. I remember Uncle Caldwell, Who took pot liquor fat And greased the pages of his book, And hid it in his hat. And had his master ever seen The leaves upon his head, He’d have thought them greasy papers, But nothing to be read. And there was Mr. Turner’s Ben, Who heard the children spell, And picked the words right up by heart, And learned to read as well.

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Well, the Northern folks kept sending The Yankee teachers down; And they stood right up and helped us, Though Rebs did sneer and frown. And I longed to read my Bible, For precious words it said; But when I begun to learn it, Folks just shook their heads, And said there is no use trying, Oh! Chloe, you’re too late; But as I was rising sixty, I had no time to wait. So I got a pair of glasses, And straight to work I went,

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A p pe n d i x And never stopped till I could read The hymns and Testament. Then I got a little cabin A place to call my own— And I felt as independent As the queen upon her throne. Church Building Uncle Jacob often told us, Since freedom blessed our race We ought all to come together And build a meeting place.

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So we pinched, and scraped, and spared, A little here and there; Though our wages was but scanty, The church did get a share. And, when the house was finished, Uncle Jacob came to pray; He was looking mighty feeble, And his head was awful gray. But his voice rang like a trumpet; His eyes looked bright and young; And it seemed a mighty power Was resting on his tongue. And he gave us all his blessing— ’Twas parting words he said, For soon we got the message The dear old man was dead. But I believe he’s in the kingdom, For when we shook his hand, He said, “Children, you must meet me Right in the promised land;

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“For when I done a moiling And toiling here below, Through the gate into the city Straightway I hope to go.” The Reunion Well, one morning real early I was going down the street, And I heard a stranger asking For Missis Chloe Fleet.

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There was something in his voice That made me feel quite shaky. And when I looked right in his face, Who should it be but Jakey! I grasped him tight, and took him home— What gladness filled my cup! And I laughed, and just rolled over, And laughed, and just give up. “Where have you been? O Jakey, dear! Why didn’t you come before? Oh! when you children went away My heart was awful sore.” “Why, mammy, I’ve been on your hunt Since ever I’ve been free, And I have heard from brother Ben,— He’s down in Tennessee. “He wrote me that he had a wife,” “And children?” “Yes, he’s three.” “You married, too?” “Oh, no, indeed, I thought I’d first get free.”

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“Then, Jakey, you will stay with me, And comfort my poor heart;

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A p pe n d i x Old Mistus got no power now To tear us both apart.

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“I’m richer now than Mistus, Because I have got my son; And Mister Thomas he is dead, And she’s nary one. “You must write to brother Benny That he must come this fall, And we’ll make the cabin bigger, And that will hold us all. “Tell him I want to see ’em all Before my life do cease; And then, like good old Simeon, I hope to die in peace.”

Chapter • 7 Mary Eliza Perine Tucker Lambert Loew’s Bridge, a Broadway Idyl

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For hours I stood upon THE BRIDGE, Which looms like a volcanic ridge, Above a scathing fire below. A flaming crater of burning hearts— And, as souls passed beneath my feet, As weary souls passed to and fro A knowledge came, so sad, yet sweet, Each inner life I seemed to know. Oh, heaven and earth! the sins and sorrows That scarred each heart with countless furrows! And yet I had a glimpse of love; For maidens, pure as snow-white dove And innocent of guile, All heedless of this world of pain, Passed under with a smile.

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Bright rosy cheeks, the badge of health— Eyes dancing in their mirth— And rose-bud lips as yet unpressed, Soft golden hair, by none caressed, For save the passion born at birth, And vanity the sin of wealth, Their hearts were pure, free of the lust, Which aye debases mortal dust. And faces sweet as Poet’s dream, Sad as the fair Evangeline, Or like Maud Muller, by the stream In the meadows raking hay, Whose face betrays the “vague unrest” Which drives from every human breast All happiness away. Some seeking for their “Gabriel,” Some mourning for lost “Judge.” Some hiding ’neath a smiling face The sorrow I know well, The sorrow which makes hearts but graves, And faces monuments. Full many a floweret passed beneath, Clasping the hand of sin, And childish voices in merry glee, Made musical the din, Like some sweet symphony which swells Amid the noise on battle field, Waking, in many a heart, the wells Of some emotion Long since dead to all save One Who for us gave His only Son; And over me a softness crept, And pining for my own, I wept. Thank God for children! for they give New life to those who would not live, But that the bonds, so holy bound, Like some fresh vine, an oak around

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A p pe n d i x Their aching hearts, too full of grief, Which find in bondage sweet relief. God bless each childish happy face, Each fairy form so full of grace— For without children life would be Devoid of all its purity. An angel? No, ’tis but a child of earth, But Venus smiled at that fair maiden’s birth. True, Poverty has placed on her his mark Of scanty garments— But tattered robes hide not the wealth and grace That nature showered on hair, and form, and face. Full many a childless parent would bestow Gold, yellow glittering gold, could that fair child With her pure face, by art’s hand undefiled, Have been her very own. But Nature sells not, freely does she give, God in His wisdom, that we all may live Contented with our lot, Gives mind and beauty to His favored few, To some He grants more than their meed of wealth, And to the rest He opes His store of health.

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This child is leading by her gentle hand Her aged grandsire, on whose sightless eyes The hand of Time has placed his seal of seals. Nor will they open, until in the skies Light of all light His glorious self reveals.

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On, on they pass—but ah! that piercing scream Awakes me—is it but a dream? No! there he stands in middle of Broadway A frozen statue, moving neither way. A horse is near him, and with instinct rare The little child, who makes his life her care, As if to shield him from approaching harm, Twines her fair arms about his aged form. I hold my breath; but ah, no need to fear, The watchful guardian of the Bridge is near, Robed in his blue coat, with the star of gold,

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Po e m s C i t e d Whose courage gives him mine of strength untold; He hurls the horse back, and they onward move, The loving guided by the hand of love.

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A rag-man passes, clad in vesture poor. O scorn him not, for in his dirty bag Is many a space for thoughts to rest upon— Of countless value is each little rag: Like trifles they accumulate, And when they mingle into one, By trying process changing state, Upon their surface lurks the hate Or love, of many a nation. ’Tis well we think not, as we cast aside The tiny fragments of our daily task, Of the dread tidings those same rags may bring E’en to our door. Some great man’s fate, like Maximilian’s doom, May o’er even strangers cast a death-like gloom. Some unjust act, a NATION put to shame, Some lines of praise, but pages full of blame. Praise give to poets, for ’tis poets’ due.— Worth should be granted to the rag-man too, For in his hands the firm foundation lies, Upon which poets’ airy-castles rise. Down, down from Romance’s perch, my muse, Wipe Fancy’s dust from off thy shoes: Let good and pure rest for a while, Portray realities of guile. Guile? Say, is there real guilt on earth? And shall we all be judged By sins—not weakness? God forbid! Mortals we are, conceived in sin— None, none are pure, all “might have been,” Had woman’s heart been made of stone. All, all are frail, and she who passes now With stains of sin upon her pallid brow,

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A p pe n d i x And misery untold within her heart, I leave to Him who said, “Neither do I condemn thee, go thy way And sin no more,” for what art thou but clay! Weary and slow she passes ’neath the arch, And now, upon her face I see a flush, as if her youth Had been renewed by some glad truth, As glancing up, into a manly face, She speaks her greeting with a pleading grace. No word from him: naught save a smile of scorn! Alone she stands—he with the tide moves on. All color from the flushing cheeks now dies, Hands press her heart to stifle woe’s deep cries. And onward, moved by demon of despair, She braves the “king of terrors” in his lair. Say, is she saved? Will the grim spectre, Death, Take from her more than life’s short fleeting breath? Doom her to endless misery of mind, Leaving a tainted name behind? Men swell the current,—many of them wear Upon their brows the cruel badge of care. The magic Greenback, like some rolling ball, Gathers the man-moss, hurls them into “Wall.” Each eager face in passing seems to say— “Chasing a dollar, comrades, clear the way! I am ambitious, and I fain would win: Would gain the dollar even if I sin.” And oft, alas, in raging lust for gold, Life’s cup is broken, and a soul is sold! Some push along with satisfaction’s air, While others wear the visage of despair. Some, looking forward, in perspective see When their one dollar shall ten thousand be. Some glancing upward, building in the sky Bright airy castles soon to fade and die: While sad-faced men look backward and pass on

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Cursing the day that ever they were born. For empty pockets beget woes untold, And friends and comfort vanish with our gold. Then should we wonder that the trash is sought, With which e’en friendship is oft sold and bought? There, mark the difference in the prosperous man, And one who gains existence as he can— One with his head erect, the other bowed, The poor are humble, but the rich are proud. Hark! surely there is music in the air! ’Tis “Dixie” floating on this Northern breeze. Thrilling each Southern heart with thoughts Of a lost Nation’s hope, and her despair. This world is strange, ’tis an anomaly! For glancing downward now I see A one-armed soldier, in a coat of blue— And, by-the-by, his legs are missing too, Grinding with his one hand the “Dixie” song. Perchance, who knows, that very tune was played, When in the midst of some mad martial raid The missile came along Which left of noble manhood but the wreck. Now, standing by his side, is one I know, a warrior, brave for Southern rights: All strife is ended, and all warring done. And the blue-clad soldier’s eyes seem dancing lights, As in his hand the Southern warrior places His mite; true, ’tis a small donation, But it betrays the great appreciation Of a brave soul, for spirit kindred born. Now “Yankee Doodle” falls upon my ear, Then “Erin’s Wearing of the Green” I hear; And as the human current moves along, I read their Nation as each hears the song— For faces speak, and eyes will tell the truth: When Memory, with swift electric string,

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A p pe n d i x Draws Past to Present, on sweet music’s wing. A tear in manhood’s eye is no disgrace, And pity lends a charm to every face. Statesmen, the satellites of Fame, Are mingling with the throng, Some heart sore with a Nation’s blame, Some charmed by the Siren song Of present popularity. Ah me! how changes tide with time, Public opinion is as vacillating As seasons are, forever on the change. Warm, temperate, cold, in changing only true, Or like some serpent, with its roseate hue, Of commendation, luring on its victim E’en to death; who, wounded by the sting Of misconception, like the poor snail, Shrinks in his shell, and starving for fame, Dies in obscurity. New eyes are mine—I see as ne’er before; Not forms alone, as in the days of yore, But acts—sins long untold— And acts of mercy to my gaze unfold. I see too, lives of men, And step by step, I trace some back to when With ragged jacket, hatless head, and feet Frozen and bare, they wandered in the street, With hope, ambition, faith within their hearts, Whose dirty faces bore the stamp of MAN. God’s own insignia, neither wealth nor fame, Nor right by birth to high ancestral name, Can grant such priceless boon. The glory be to him who can declare I am the founder of the name I bear. Not the last scion of the great of earth, But first; the hour which gave me birth Shall be remembered, until time shall be Lost in the mazes of Eternity.

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One word of praise, and it is nobly won For him who said, “I will win for my Son A name all glorious and bright.” Censorious world! oh why not o’er the past Oblivion’s vail in its soft darkness cast And honor grant, for what one IS not WAS. Our City rulers pass in grand array, Some whose each step pollutes this snowy way, Whose nervous glances tell that they have sold Their honor for position and for gold. Others, whose pure lives can command Respect, aye love, of all e’en in this land, Where merit’s granted but to favored few. Our present Mayor, with abstracted air, Comes with kind greeting, for high, low and fair. In each heart holds he a much envied place, And his position fills with nameless grace. And yet he bears upon his brow the badge Of hope deferred, Ambition’s goal half won— The race for station only just begun. His rival follows, and determination Within his eye shows will to do, or dare— Not only will, but power, Dame Nature’s priceless dower. From very foot the mount of fame he trod: Sprung from the people, he’s the people’s god. And Authors, too, the devils of the quill, Who daily, hourly their poor brains distil: Exalted, trampled by the public will; And yet they cater, and will cater still, Undaunted by the missiles hurled Each day by a censorious world. Some with their faces beaming bright See in their eyes success’ light; Some who on yesterday were naught, To-day they find themselves the sought

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A p pe n d i x And courted, for their genius bright, A reputation Made by the “NATION,” Growing like Jonah’s gourd all in a night. And some poor sinner who awoke From dream of fame, alas to find His fancy’s child, child of his mind, Damned by the critics, Or unnoticed passed. Ah, well, when he is dead, perchance his name May live forever, immortalized by fame. Such is the world’s great largess to the dead, The genius who when living wanted bread. ’Tis marvellous how mortals can invent The ways and means to increase worldly stores. Scorn not beginnings, and each small thing prize, From e’en a cord, sometimes large fortunes rise. Yon apple-woman, vender of small wares, Stale lozenges, fruit, candy, and vile cakes, Who sells to urchins pennies’ worth of aches, Has now the gold safe hoarded in the bank, With which to buy high place in fashion’s rank. Merit is nothing, money rules the day Right royally, with rare despotic sway. Something familiar comes before me now, A picture of the Southern cotton-plant. Broadway today, with its white glittering shield, Is not as pure as Southern cotton field; With flakes of snow bursting from bolls of green, Like some imprisoned genius scorning to be Confined by laws, which bind society, And breaking bonds is wafted on the breeze Of public favor, or gathered by the slaves Of Fashion, whose vile hands Pollute its purity. True, fragments now and then Are gently taken to the hearts of men— White flowers of fancy oftimes sink to rest

Po e m s C i t e d Deep in the wells of some fair maiden’s breast: Pure in themselves, they yet become more fair By contact with the holy thoughts in there.

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Cotton and slaves, ’twas thus we counted gold, The slaves are free, the free in bondage sold; And now some man with rare prolific brains, Genius inventive, by the name of Gaines, Has made a bitters of the cotton plant; Polluting thus the hitherto white name By clothing it in the vile badge of shame. White, glaring white, is all the earth below, And Broadway seems a “universe of snow.” Or like the Ocean’s silver-crested waves, Upon whose breasts thousands of barks are tossed; Some brave the storm,—by cautious pilots mann’d, Some strike on breakers, ere they reach the land, And are forever lost. E’er yet the sun his quarter’s course had run, Buyers and sellers their day’s work begun. Behind the counter patiently they toil, Nor mingle with the busy passing throng; Save here and there, an eager care-faced man, Who wiping cold dew from his tortured brow, Seeks “Wall,” to borrow wherewithal to pay The rude, insulting, taunting, clamorous crew, Who all-importunate demand their due. Teachers of truth, now with the throng pass by, Some hypocrites, with sanctimonious air, Sin in their hearts, upon their faces prayer. Preaching the truth, and living but a lie, Make me repeat this maxim ever good— “I am more afraid of Error in the guise of Truth, Than Truth in garb of Error.” Brave was the man, his heart was pure and strong, Who, from the pulpit, said the world was wrong To clothe the Prodigal in direst shame,

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A p pe n d i x And bless the brother with a stainless name. ’Tis to the dying that the doctors give The healing potion, that will make them live. No, not the righteous did Christ come to save, The weak need courage, not the strong and brave. He passes now, upon his face, a smile That faces wear, when hearts are free from guile. “Church of the strangers,” I have watched thy growth, Have seen thee from a mustard seed spring forth, And in thy towering majesty arise, Until thy spreading branches touched the skies. All honor be to him whose tender care Has raised the sapling to a tree so fair. And “Norwood’s” author, whose great study’s man Seems seeking on this thoroughfare to find Some subject for his mighty mind To dwell upon— With which to charm the senses of the millions Who throng to hear him, for he’s Fashion’s “rage,” As one will be, who makes his church a theatre, His pulpit but a stage. Religion in this wise, enlightened day, Is free to all, that is, if they have gold; The vilest sinner is absolved for pay, And to him wide the grand church-doors unfold. But woe to him who fain would enter in The gilded fold, whose poverty’s his sin. Now is the Hall clock on the stroke of One; The Sultans of the journalistic art, Some without brains, and many without heart, Come forth to lord it, and in one short hour The City’ll quake beneath its ruling power. The daily press, Whose influence is almighty, Then it should

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Feed greedy masses, with the pure and good, Not gather like the great Jove-headed Wood, The daily slander, or the last sensation, Showing our shame to every foreign nation. He’s for the South! what care I if he is, Good can be found here, we have evil South. The Man I honor for his love of right And justice, but my truthful muse Can give no merit to the “Evening News.” The “Evening Mail” I grant an honored place In the home circle, for its columns bear Naught save the pure, no badge of our disgrace, Nothing that Age or Youth would blush to see, or hear. The Poet editor, whose graceful rhyme Touches the heart like the soft, sweet chime Of memory bells, approaches now. His hair is silvered by the hand of Time, But his eyes still beam with the youth sublime That wells from the heart; the poetic fire That lives, and lives, through years and years, Whose brightness is dimmed not by joys nor tears. Ah! now I see in the passing throng A “prophet and poet,” our “king of song,” The bard of Erin, as brave and true A “Private,” as ever wore the blue, Whose bright lights of genius most brilliantly shine, When kindled on altar of love and—wine. Now comes a white-haired man with mild and lamb-like face, Kind, gentle eyes, who bears an honored name, Beloved by friend, revered by even foe, Wields the pen-sceptre with majestic grace, Who, by example, soothed a people’s hate, And saved a nation from the cursing woe And bitter shame of striking conquered foe— Was once a farmer’s lad in the old “Granite State.” The hardy sons of stern New England’s soil,

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A p pe n d i x Taught from their birth to fear not want, nor toil, Bears not the marks of the most dire disease That Southerners inherit,—love of ease. Well, times have changed, the galling chain That made the black man bow Subservient to a master’s mighty will, Is broken for Eternity; And with that chain the cord that bound Our Southern souls in idleness to earth, Wealth earned by others, strown with lavish hand, With but one power, the power to command, Is loosed, And on Ambition’s wings our eager soul Can reach the mount, Ambition’s much-prized goal, And grasping to our hearts the spectre Fame, We faint to find the goddess but a name. Dreaming again! Ah, how the memory clings To the dead past; a touch but opes the door Of the dim vista of departed years, And phantoms of our hopes and fears, In dreamy indistinct array, Seem flitting up and down this snowy way. A loaded wagon now, has ope’d the door— “Wilcox and Gibbs’” machine—and nothing more. Now, I am in the sunny land of flowers, And smell the perfume from the jasmine bowers; By opened window sit I half my days, Sewing the while, but stopping oft to gaze At two bright fairies, who with sable friends Hide, like the pixies, Underneath the petals of some bright flower, Whose clear celestial hue My darlings shame, with their bright eyes of blue. They crown each other with the garlands fair, The “grey-beard” mingles with their silken hair Like cords of silver, with the jet and gold,

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Soft tiny hands are resting on my brow, I too am crowned: “I would have made your wreath of white,” The eldest says, “you are so good, But, mother, sister said that you were true, And so we added all these violets blue.” My good machine partaking of my pride Sang one sweet song; and made the stitches fine, Making the children hers as well as mine. ’Tis half-past one, and now is seen In countless numbers eager “limbs of law” Wending their way to “Courtlandt” from “Nassau,” To while away an hour with “Smith and Green.” Their minds to fortify, with meat and drink, Ex necessitate rei, to enable them to think. Law! say, what is the law but power? The strongest mind will rule the hour. Right, justice, mercy, ah! where are they now? Not in this land, or, if here, bound in chains, And only loosed by the command of law, To whose decree, howe’er unjust we bow, In meek submission low. This science intricate we trace E’en to the dwelling place Of our first parents; Children of nature, and of God, They knew not there was sin ’Till Satan, in a lawyer’s garb, Their Eden entered, and with him the light Or power of knowing wrong from right. But, like his children of the present day, By statements colored in a legal way, And well instilled into his client’s mind By the rare subtleties of lore profound, Sowing his seed into prolific ground, He made the white black, and the darkness light, Changed Adam’s day into eternal night By causing wrong appear to be the right:

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A p pe n d i x And ever thus, as serpents charm they, when They cast their glamour on the eyes of men, And their each word’s a snare,— Of Lawyers then, ye innocent, beware! This world’s a stage, each mortal acts a part Of life’s deep tragedy. A breaking heart Is often hid beneath a smiling face. Ye, over righteous, if this world’s a stage, Why scorn the mimic copy of life’s page? Sermons are preached to touch the hearts of men: No sermon ever moved my heart, as when I heard sweet “Fanchon,” on her bended knee, Sending above to the kind Deity A maiden’s holy prayer; And then and there I too prayed that the ray divine Within my sinful heart should shine. Oft have I seen the eye of age grow dim At the mere attitude of homeless “Rip.” No temperance lecturer could call the vow Which once burst forth in passionate impulsiveness, From one who heard the play. “Never, oh never, shall e’en the smallest sip, So help me God, again pollute my lip Of aught that will intoxicate!” Surely the spirits which surround us rise And register such vows above the skies. Now comes a spirit brave, I ween, Who on the theater’s board is Queen, But on this tragic stage of life, When kinsmen were at war and strife, An angel ministering became. In sable robes she stood by beds of death, Wiped the death dews, and caught the latest breath Of the brave boys in blue, Who are sleeping now in the silent grave, That o’er all the land one flag might wave.

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It waves—but its folds are dyed with the blood Of the murdered martyrs, the brave, the true, Who wore the GREY, and who wore the BLUE! “Physician, heal thyself!” I fain would cry To those devoted to the healing art, Who in vast numbers now are passing by: Is there one wise enough to heal A wound in his own heart? Can healing potions which the Doctors give Imbue the fainting with a wish to live? Can one relieve the sleepless nights of pain, Ambition’s meed, the torture of the brain That ever grasps beyond, above, so high, That all its efforts prove, alas! in vain, And weary, sinking to the earth, It curses hour that gave it birth, Dies, or becomes insane? There comes an old, well known slouch hat, Which hides no slouching soul beneath its shade, But one whose greatest power lies In curing body by first healing mind. Did they not know when the immortal Davis lay Within his prison cell, That the Leach’s skill was not in drugs, Who healed and made him well? They knew not, who the power of speech denied, Of histories in touch of hands; Of volumes in a glance. How could they know? formed of earth’s common clay, Of the magnetic cords which bind The thoughts of those whose natures are refined, Whose bodies are subservient to the mind. Strange, how a mortal by the power of will And genius, tho’ untutored can exalt Himself, until he will appear A being from another sphere.

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A p pe n d i x As unlike to the common throng As rhyming jingle to a stately song. Few days ago, I heard kind blessings showered Upon his head who now draws near: Who had opened the once closed portals Of a soul’s doors. A mother, with a fearful heart, Without one ray of hope, Placed in this Doctor’s hands her only child, Whose beauty needed naught, save sight, To make it seem an angel bright. One stifled cry! ‘Oh, mother, is this light? ’Twas black before, and, mother, now ’tis white. I see you, mother, and I see God too!’ The little child, with its pure instinct rare, Felt that God’s spirit surely must be there, For mother taught Light was, at God’s command, And God alone could hold light in His hand. The seasons change, opinions change, And even senses change with time; In age we see not with the eyes We looked from in our youth’s full prime. Couleur de rose is turned to sober grey, Which grows more sombre every hour and day; And Fashion too, like all things here below, Is ever changing, as the sunset cloud; First a vast mountain, then a fleecy shroud, A mass of darkness, now of crimson hue, Soft, silver-tinted, then a violet blue, Then blending all the shades in the rainbow. Now Fashion’s minions, in the last new style, Pass and repass, disdaining the slight smile That curls the lip of every scornful man, Whose brains inventive all new styles design, From fancy gaiters to arranging hair. I’ve studied Nature, and I’ve studied Art, Can at a glance detect, in smallest part

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Of a grand toilet, whose great Artist’s skill, Moulded the madam to her august will, If from the fashion-plates of Harper’s good “Bazar,” “Die Modenwelt” or “Magazine Of Madam Demorest,” the robes were made. If the rival artists of the present day, Which hold in Fashion’s world the sway Of reigning queens, Their wondrous genius used to create The airy, fairy figures slight, Which make this city full of light. I know, if from our “Merchant Prince” was bought The fabric rare, made in a foreign land, Upon whose very surface seems inwrought A sightless eye, a wasted, helpless hand Of some poor wretch, who e’en his senses gave To deck the garment over which we rave. Those tasty habits, costly, plain, and neat, Disclosing ’neath their folds two tiny feet, Snugly encased in leather-shoes thick soled, Are snares which catch the unwary heart of man; Those costly jewels, too, from “Browne and Spaulding’s” bought— Are many a lesson to the wedded taught, That Fanchon bonnet, ribbon and a flower, Speak to man’s pocket with all potent power. But Fashion, although charming for a while, Has not the lasting power of a smile. Broadway! all glorious and grand, the city’s heart; A panorama! on the changing scene I gaze With reverential awe. Work of man’s hand—proof of a mortal’s skill, Who moulds such structures to his mighty will. Once, where the “Herald” palace stands, The red man claimed his home and lands. One hundred years ago Hans smoked at ease On summer eve, beneath the sheltering trees Which grew where now the “Leader,” “Tribune,” “World,” Is daily, weekly, to our gaze unfurled,

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A p pe n d i x Sending abroad the city’s different views Of national affairs. Where stands the office of the Surrogate and “Times,” A church-bell pealed its sweet and solemn chimes, Not twenty years ago. So the huge building rears its stately head Above the city of the sainted dead. Thrice haunted spot! for when the Hall clock Strikes the hour of ten each night, One gifted with a two-fold sight Can witness scenes, scenes so appalling, drear, That common souls would faint to even hear.— First comes the red man, brandishing in air His tomahawk, showing despair Upon his dusky face; Then, with triumphant stare, He waves above his head the hair, Dripping with gore, of newly murdered foe. His pale wife follows, and a sad surprise Rests on her face, and in her mournful eyes, They seem to miss the grand old forest trees, And with the wail, “No home! no place of rest!” They vanish as they came. Fantastic forms in dress of olden times Enter at will, through each self-opening door, Or oft arise in seeming through the floor, Chanting with solemn voices, old sweet hymns; Such good old tunes, as in the days of yore Made echoes ring from hill-side, and from shore. Old wrinkled dames,—men in their manhood’s prime, And round-faced maidens, with their locks of night, Their crimson cheeks, and eyes so full of light, Linger a moment, and then fade away. Men robed in later styles the dark halls fill, Hold eager consultation; then a thrill Of indignation seems to move the mass, And to the office of the Surrogate they throng, In a chill current, like the whirlwind strong— And eagerly they seek, in each small nook to find

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Some traces of the WILL they left behind. Some smiling faces look upon me now, But many glance, with a dark lowering brow, Upon the fragments of a broken will. In deep sepulchral tones, amid the ghostly din, A stern voice utters, “Bring the culprit in.” And the last Surrogate Is ushered in, and takes his chair of state; Grim Death is standing by his head, And o’er him spirits of the happy dead Are keeping watch. Orphans and widows, with all patience wait To hear the verdict of the Surrogate. He tears the will, declares ’tis Law’s command, And in a moment all the ghostly band Have vanished, save the solemn clerk Who writes until earth’s pall of night Is changed for robes of glorious light. Shadows on the snow are lying, Day is dead, the year is dying; Wailing winds around are sighing For the year that now is dying. Tell me, year, before thy fleeting, Tell me what will be the greeting Of the year we’ll soon be meeting, Are the hopes that fill me, cheating?

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Old year, whisper—still I listen! Are hopes only drops that glisten For a moment, as they christen Rosebuds newly born? And the old year tells me, dying, In the voice of winds soft sighing— “Child of earth, cease, cease thy crying, What is life but hope?”

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A p pe n d i x Old year, give me e’er thy leaving Token that I may cease grieving; Make my faith pure, keep me believing Both in man and God. Silver clouds are o’er me sailing, And the strickened year fast paling, Softly whispers ’mid the wailing— “I leave thee LOVE and HOPE.” 1867

Chapter • 9 Anonymous The Three Little Kittens

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Three little kittens lost their mittens; And they began to cry, O mother dear, We very much fear That we have lost our mittens. Lost your mittens! You naughty kittens! Then you shall have no pie! Mee-ow, mee-ow, mee-ow. No, you shall have no pie. Mee-ow, mee-ow, mee-ow. The three little kittens found their mittens, And they began to cry, O mother dear, See here, see here; See, we have found our mittens. Put on your mittens, You silly kittens, And you may have some pie. Purr-r, purr-r, purr-r, O, let us have the pie, Purr-r, purr-r, purr-r.

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The three little kittens put on their mittens, And soon ate up the pie; O mother dear, We greatly fear That we have soiled our mittens. Soiled your mittens! You naughty kittens! Then they began to sigh, Mee-ow, mee-ow, mee-ow. Then they began to sigh, Mee-ow, mee-ow, mee-ow. The three little kittens washed their mittens, And hung them out to dry; O mother dear, Do you not hear That we have washed our mittens? Washed your mittens! O, you’re good kittens! But I smell a rat close by, Hush! hush! mee-ow, mee-ow. We smell a rat close by, Mee-ow, mee-ow, mee-ow. 1833

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Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow, And everywhere that Mary went The lamb was sure to go; He followed her to school one day— That was against the rule, It made the children laugh and play, To see a lamb at school.

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A p pe n d i x And so the teacher turned him out, But still he lingered near, And waited patiently about, Till Mary did appear; And then he ran to her, and laid His head upon her arm, As if he said—“I’m not afraid— You’ll shield me from all harm.” “What makes the lamb love Mary so?” The eager children cry— “O, Mary loves the lamb, you know,” The teacher did reply;— “And you each gentle animal In confidence may bind, And make it follow at your call, If you are always kind.” 1830

Mary Mapes Dodge Shepherd John Oh! Shepherd John is good and kind, Oh! Shepherd John is brave; He loves the weakest of his flock, His arm is quick to save. 5

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But Shepherd John to little John Says: “Learn, my laddie, learn! In grassy nooks still read your books, And aye for knowledge burn. Read while you tend the grazing flock: Had I but loved my book, I’d not be still in shepherd’s frock, Nor bearing shepherd’s crook.

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The world is wide, the world is fair, There’s muckle work to do. I’ll rest content a shepherd still, But grander fields for you!” 1875

Mary Mapes Dodge The Way to Do It I’ll tell you how I speak a piece: First, I make my bow; Then I bring my words out clear And plain as I know how. 5

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Next, I throw my hands up so! Then I lift my eyes— That’s to let my hearers know Something doth surprise. Next, I grin and show my teeth, Nearly every one; Shake my shoulders, hold my sides: That’s the sign of fun. Next I start and knit my brow, Hold my head erect: Something’s wrong, you see, and I Decidedly object. Then I wabble at my knees, Clutch at shadows near, Tremble well from top to toe: That’s the sign of fear. Now I start, and with a leap Seize an airy dagger. “WRETCH!” I cry. That’s tragedy, Every soul to stagger.

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A p pe n d i x Then I let my voice grow faint, Gasp and hold my breath; Tumble down and plunge about: That’s a villain’s death. Quickly then I come to life, Perfectly restored; With a bow my speech is done. Now you’ll please applaud. 1874

Hannah Flagg Gould Apprehension

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“Oh! sister, he is so swift and tall, Though I want the ride, he will spoil it all, For, when he sets out, he will let me fall, And give me a bump, I know! Mamma, what was it I heard you say, About the world’s hobbies, the other day, How some would get on and gallop away, To end with an overthrow?” “I said, little prattler, the world was a race, That many would mount with a smile on the face, And ride to their ruin, or fall in disgrace: That him, who was deaf to fear, And did not look out for a rein or a guide, His courser might cast on the highway side, In the mud, rocks and brambles, to end his ride, Perchance with a sigh and a tear!” “Oh! sister, sister! I fear to try; For Brutus’s back is so live and high! It creeps at my touch—and he winks his eye— I’m sure he is going to jump! Come! dear mother, tell us some more About the world’s ride, as you did before,

Po e m s C i t e d Who helped it up—and all how it bore The fall, and got over the bump!” 1836

Mary Mapes Dodge The Wooden Horse

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A real horse is good, But a horse made of wood Is a much better horsey for me; For he needn’t be tied, And he’s steady beside, And never gets lazy, you see. When pulled, he will go; And he stops when you “whoa!” For he always is willing to please; And though you may stay By the water all day, Not once for a drink will he tease. Not a handful of feed, All his life, does he need; And he never wants brushing or combing: And after a race All over the place, He never stands panting and foaming. He doesn’t heed flies, Though they light on his eyes; Mosquitoes and gnats he won’t mind: And he never will shy, Though a train whizzes by, But always is gentle and kind. A real horse, some day, Will be running away; A donkey is so apt to kick;

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A p pe n d i x A goat will upset you, A doggie will fret you— Your wooden horse hasn’t a trick! No chance of a crash, Or a runaway smash, Though never so playful and free. Oh! I like when I drive To be brought home alive— So a fine wooden horsey for me! 1875

Hannah Flagg Gould The Butterfly’s Dream A tulip, just opened, had offered to hold A butterfly, gaudy and gay; And, rocked in a cradle of crimson and gold, The careless young slumberer lay. 5

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For the butterfly slept, as such thoughtless ones will, At ease, and reclining on flowers, If ever they study, ’tis how they may kill The best of their mid-summer hours. And the butterfly dreamed, as is often the case With indolent lovers of change, Who, keeping the body at ease in its place, Give fancy permission to range. He dreamed that he saw, what he could but despise, The swarm from a neighbouring hive; Which, having come out for their winter supplies, Had made the whole garden alive. He looked with disgust, as the proud often do, On the diligent movements of those,

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Who, keeping both present and future in view, Improve every hour as it goes. As the brisk little alchymists passed to and fro, With anger the butterfly swelled; And called them mechanics—a rabble too low To come near the station he held.

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“Away from my presence!” said he, in his sleep, “Ye humble plebeians! nor dare Come here with your colorless winglets to sweep The king of this brilliant parterre!” He thought, at these words, that together they flew, And, facing about, made a stand; And then, to a terrible army they grew, And fenced him on every hand. Like hosts of huge giants, his numberless foes Seemed spreading to measureless size: Their wings with a mighty expansion arose, And stretched like a veil o’er the skies. Their eyes seemed like little volcanoes, for fire,— Their hum, to a cannon-peal grown,— Farina to bullets was rolled in their ire, And, he thought, hurled at him and his throne. He tried to cry quarter! his voice would not sound, His head ached—his throne reeled and fell; His enemy cheered, as he came to the ground, And cried, “king Paipilio, farewell!”

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His fall chased the vision—the sleeper awoke, The wonderful dream to expound; The lightning’s bright flash from the thunder-cloud broke, And hail-stones were rattling around. He’d slumbered so long, that now, over his head, The tempest’s artillery rolled;

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A p pe n d i x The tulip was shattered—the whirl-blast had fled, And borne off its crimson and gold.

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Mary Mapes Dodge The Mayor Of Scuttleton

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The Mayor of Scuttleton burned his nose Trying to warm his copper toes; He lost his money and spoiled his will By signing his name with an icicle-quill; He went bare-headed, and held his breath, And frightened his grandame most to death; He loaded a shovel, and tried to shoot, And killed the calf in the leg of his boot; He melted a snow-bird, and formed the habit Of dancing jigs with a sad Welsh rabbit; He lived on taffy, and taxed the town; And read his newspaper upside down; Then he sighed, and hung his hat on a feather, And bade the townspeople come together; But the worst of it all was, nobody knew What the Mayor of Scuttleton next would do. 1875

Lizzie W. Champney How Persimmons Took Cah ob der Baby Persimmons was a colored lad ’Way down in Lou’sianny, And all the teaching that he had

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Was given him by his granny. But he did his duty ever As well as you, it may be; With faithfulness and pride always, He minded missus’ baby. He loved the counsels of the saints, And, sometimes, those of sinners, To run off ’possum-hunting and Steal “water-milion” dinners. And fervently at meetin’, too, On every Sunday night, He’d with the elders shout and pray By the pine-knots’ flaring light, And sing their rudest melodies, With voice so full and strong, You could almost think he learned them From the angels’ triumph song. SONG.

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“We be nearer to de Lord Dan de white folks,—and dey knows it. See de glory-gate unbarred,— Walk in, darkies, past de guard,— Bet you dollar He won’t close it. “Walk in, darkies, troo de gate, Hear de kullered angels holler; Go ’way, white folks, you’re too late, We’s de winnin’ kuller. Wait Till de trumpet blow to foller.” He would croon this over softly As he lay out in the sun; But the song he heard most often, His granny’s favorite one,— Was, “Jawge Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Persimmons, Henry Clay, be Quick, shut de do’,

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A p pe n d i x Get up off dat flo’, Come heah and mind de baby.” One night there came a fearful storm, Almost a second flood; The river rose, a torrent swoln Of beaten, yellow mud. It bit at its embankments, And lapped them down in foam, Till, surging through a wide crevasse, The waves seethed round their home. They scaled the high verandah, They filled the parlors clear, Till floating chairs and tables Clashed against the chandelier. ’Twas then Persimmons’ granny, Stout of arm and terror-proof, By means of axe and lever, Pried up the verandah roof; Bound mattresses upon it With stoutest cords of rope, Lifted out her fainting mistress, Saying, “Honey, dar is hope! You, Jawge Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Persimmons, Henry Clay, be Quick on dat raft, Don’t star’ like a calf, But take good cah ob baby!” The frothing river lifted them Out on its turbid tide, And for awhile they floated on Together, side by side; Till, broken by the current strong, The frail raft snapt in two, And Persimmons saw his granny Fast fading from his view. The deck-hands on a steamboat Heard, as they passed in haste,

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A child’s voice singing in the dark, Upon the water’s waste, A song of faith and triumph, Of Moses and the Lord; And throwing out a coil of rope, They drew him safe on board. Full many a stranger city Persimmons wandered through, “A-totin ob der baby,” and Singing songs he knew. At length some City Fathers Objected to his plan, Arresting as a vagrant Our valiant little man. They carried out their purposes, Persimmons “’lowed he’d spile ’em,” So, sloping from the station-house, He stole baby from the ’sylum. And on that very afternoon, As it was growing dark, He sang, beside the fountain in The crowded city park, A rude camp-meeting anthem, Which he had sung before, While on his granny’s fragile raft He drifted far from shore: SONG.

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“Moses smote de water, and De sea gabe away; De chilleren dey passed ober, for De sea gabe away, O Lord! I feel so glad, It am always dark ’fo’ day, So, honey, don’t yer be sad, De sea’ll gib away.”

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A p pe n d i x A lady, dressed in mourning, Turned with a sudden start, Gave one glance at the baby, Then caught it to her heart; While a substantial shadow, That was walking by her side, Seized Persimmons by the shoulder, And, while she shook him, cried: “You, Jawge Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Persimmons, Henry Clay, be Quick, splain yerself, chile,— Stop dat ar fool smile,— Whar you done been wid baby?” 1874

Notes

. Wrappings: A Methodological Introduction 1. See Cheryl Walker, ed., American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1992); Janet Gray, ed., She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997); and Paula Bernat Bennett, Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology (London: Basil Blackwell, 1997). 2. K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of U.S. Social Policy (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) 37. 3. Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979). 4. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2d ed., New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 73. 5. Himani Bannerji, Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism, and AntiRacism (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1995), 81–9. 6. James Brewer Stewart, “The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1790–1940,” Journal of the Early Republic 18:2 (Summer 1998) 181–217. 7. Bannerji 83. 8. David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997) 134–6. 9. T. V. F. Brogan, “Poetics,” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993) 929. 10. Paul Lauter, “The Literatures of America: A Comparative Discipline,” Canons and Contexts (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991) 48–87. 11. Brogan 929–33. 12. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985) 38. 13. Tompkins 200. 14. Tompkins 129. 15. Swartz 98–9. 16. Cameron 23. 17. Cameron 88. 18. Cameron 88.

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19. Cameron 88. 20. Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Akzente, 1958; reprinted in Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature, v. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 37. 21. Cameron 210. 22. Adorno 39. 23. Adorno 50. 24. Adorno 53. 25. Adorno 54. 26. Janet Gray, “Feminist Poetics,” Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory, ed. Beth Kowaleski-Wallace (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1997) 157–9; see Linda Kintz, The Subject’s Tragedy: Political Poetics, Feminist Theory, and Drama (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992) 1–28. 27. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, v. 14, Essays and Miscellanies, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: AMS Press, 1965) 201. 28. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995) 134. 29. See, for example, Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking (New York: Routledge, 1989). 30. Bannerji 13. 31. Bannerji 20. 32. Bannerji 186. 33. Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1993) 17. 33. Bannerji 117. 34. James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); reprinted in Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1994) 496. 36. Baldwin 496. 37. Collins 69 citing Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford UP, 1987) 22. 38. Tompkins xvi. 39. Swartz, chapter 5. 40. Baldwin 499. 41. Baldwin 500. 42. Tompkins 134. 43. Cameron 169. 44. Cameron 242. 45. Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 115, 117. 46. Zizek 117. 47. Zizek 118. 48. Zizek 120.

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49. Sundquist 351 citing Dorothy Scarborough, On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1925) 159. 50. bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989) 42. 51. Sources for these paragraphs on the Mammy stereotype are Jewell, 37–44, Collins 69–77, and Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Random House, 1999) 13–5. 52. Timothy Robins, “Remembering the Future: The Cultural Study of Memory,” Theorizing Culture: An Interdisciplinary Critique after Postmodernism, ed. Barbara Adam and Stuart Allan (New York: New York UP, 1995) 201–13. My comments draw on Robins’s discussions of Colin MacCabe, “Memory, Phantasy, Identity: ‘Days of Hope’ and the Politics of the Past,” Popular Television and Film, T. Bennett et al., eds. (London: British Film Institute/Open University, 1981) 314–8; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971); and Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: a Seminar with Michel Foucault (London: Tavistock, 1988). 53. Stewart 181–217. 54. Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, ed. Carolyn Karcher (U Massachusetts P, 1995) 126–7. 55. Child 186. 56. Child 124. 57. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin, 1988) 260–1. 58. Friedrich Schiller, “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” Essays, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 1993) 193. 59. Schiller 193. 60. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, v. 1, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1971) 35–9. Note that in discussing Emerson’s ideas, I have preserved his gender bias, using “man” rather than gender-neutral terms. 61. Emerson 19. 62. Emerson 25. 63. Collins 73–4 citing Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (New York: Pergamon, 1985) 2. 64. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Address on Emancipation in the British West Indies,” Emerson’s Complete Works, v. 11, Miscellanies (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1883) 171–2. 65. Sheila S. Walker, “Introduction: Are You Hip to the Jive? (Re)Writing/Righting the Pan-American Discourse,” African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001) 2–3. 66. Walker 3. 67. Cited in Walker 3. 68. Emerson, “Address” 172. 69. Sundquist 583; W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 53.

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70. Edmund Clarence Stedman, introduction, An American Anthology, ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1900) xix. 71. Stedman xxii–xxxi. 72. Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997). 73. Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53–92; Fred Botting, “Culture, Subjectivity and the Real; or, Psychoanalysis Reading Postmodernity,” Adam and Allan 87–99. Several other social theorists’ influence on this study is pervasive: Raymond Williams, especially The Sociology of Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1982); Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971); and Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1984). Rita Felski (Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change [Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1989]) and Laurie Finke (Feminist Theory, Women’s Writing: Reading Women Writing [New York: Cornell UP, 1992]) are the critics who have most strongly influenced my approach to reading poetry. . Contesting the Pearl: Whiteness, Blackness, and the Possession of American Poetry 1. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992) 8. 2. Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984) 116. 3. Morrison 47. 4. Janet Gray, “Popular Poetry,” Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Eric Haralson (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998) 347–52; Jack Nachbar and Kevin Lause, “An Introduction to the Study of Popular Culture: What Is This Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of?” Popular Culture: An Introductory Text, ed. Jack Nachbar and Kevin Lause (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State UP, 1992) 15–7. 5. Susan Coultrap-McQuin, “Gentlemen and Ladies: Ideals and Economics in the Literary Marketplace,” Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Greensboro: U of North Carolina P, 1990) 27–48; Gregory Clark and Michael S. Halloran, introduction, Oratorical Culture in Ninetenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric, ed. Gregory Clark and Michael S. Halloran (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993) 1–26; Janet Gray, introduction, She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Janet Gray (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997) xxxii. 6. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988). 7. Coultrap-McQuin 47–8.

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8. Joseph Harrington, “Why American Poetry Is Not American Literature,” American Literary History 8:3 (Fall 1996): 496–515. 9. Harrington 496–515. 10. William Harmon, ed., The Top 500 Poems (New York: Columbia UP, 1992). 11. First edition 1904; current edition Edith P. Hazen, ed., The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry (New York: Columbia UP, 1994). 12. Like countless other anthologizers since the mid-nineteenth century, Harmon attributes “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” to Clement Clarke Moore. Controversies surrounding the poem’s authorship had been put to rest until Don Foster argued, based on textual evidence, against Moore in a chapter of his Author Unknown: Tales of a Literary Detective (New York: Owl Books, 2001). Although Foster’s argument attracted media attention and convinced many, persuasive counterarguments have also appeared, most notably Stephen Nissenbaum’s “There Arose Such a Clatter: Who Really Wrote ‘The Night before Christmas’? (And Why Does It Matter?)” Common-place 1:2 (January 2001) www.common-place.org. I will return to the poem and the controversy in chapter 9. 13. Edmund Clarence Stedman, introduction, An American Anthology, ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1900) xix. 14. Stedman xxii, xxv. 15. Stedman xix–xx. 16. Stedman xxvii–xxviii, xxx–xxxi. 17. Stedman xxxi. 18. F. O. Matthiessen, introduction, The Oxford Book of American Verse, ed. F. O. Matthiessen (New York: Oxford UP, 1950). 19. Matthiessen xxi. 20. Matthiessen xx. 21. Paul Lauter, gen. ed., The Heath Anthology of American Literature (Lexington, MA, and Toronto: D. C. Heath and Company, 1990, 1994, 1997). 22. John Hollander, ed., American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (New York: Library of America, 1993). 23. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, eds., The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th ed. (New York: Norton & Company, 1996). 24. See, for example, Allison Heisch’s headnote in Lauter, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 2d. ed., 1994, v. 1, 2705. 25. William Cullen Bryant, “Thanatopsis,” in Hollander, ed. 122–4. 26. Gelett Burgess, The Burgess Nonsense Book (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1901) 94–5. 27. Gray, “Popular Poetry” 352. 28. Gray, She Wields a Pen xxvii. 29. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986) 17, citing John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1967), 1, secs. 62–5.

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30. Kerber 229. 31. Kerber 11, 206. 32. Kerber 192–3. 33. Kerber 228. 34. Kerber 193. 35. Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of NineteenthCentury American Women Editors (Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1995). 36. Coultrap-McQuin 19–20. 37. Morrison 25. 38. Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1989); Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1993). 39. Sanchez-Eppler demonstrates this thesis in chapters in Touching Liberty on the poetry of Whitman and Dickinson, 50–82, 105–31. 40. See Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1988) 57, 73. 41. Emily Stipes Watts, The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (Austin: U of Texas P, 1977) 141–2. 42. Coultrap-McQuinn 1–7. 43. Stedman xxii. 44. Watts 68. 45. Douglas 235. Douglas provides an indispensable guide for reading her groundbreaking study in a 1988 preface, where she retrospectively critiques her 1977 work through the lens of later feminist scholarship. Her self-critique is also a reminder of the complex ways that the scholarly projects of recovering women’s writing and reassessing popular culture are intertwined. Bringing male-biased, canonical assumptions to her topic, Douglas notes, she tended to underrate the social effectiveness of literary women; she conflated her interest in the contest between mass and elite culture with a contest between male and female literary production; and, in emphasizing conflict, she oversimplified the differences between mass and elite culture by overstating the mindless addictiveness of consuming feminine/popular culture. 46. Okker 142–4, citing Sarah Josepha Hale, “Woman the Poet of Nature,” Godey’s Lady’s Book (May 1837): 193–5. 47. Cheryl Walker, The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982). 48. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” Essays, Second Series (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1903–4) 12–3. 49. Timothy Morris, Becoming Canonical in American Poetry (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1995) xiii. 50. Harry Lyman Koopman, “Emily Dickinson,” reprinted in Emily Dickinson’s Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History, ed. Willis J. Buckingham (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1989) 521; cited in Morris 69.

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51. Morris 25; Janet Gray, “Emily Dickinson,” American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Retrospective Supplement, ed. A. Walton Litz and Molly Weigel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1998) 40. 52. Adrienne Rich, “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979) 157–83; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 581–650. 53. Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986) 28. 54. Joanne Dobson, Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989). 55. Betsy Erkkila, “Emily Dickinson and Class,” The American Literary History Reader, ed. Gordon Hutner (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995) 310–1. 56. Martha Nell Smith, introduction and chapter 1, “To Fill a Gap: Erasures, Disguises, Definitions,” Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (Austin: U of Texas P, 1992) 1–50. See also Martha Nell Smith, Ellen Louise Hart, and Marta Werner, gen. eds., Dickinson Electronic Archives (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson). 57. Erkkila 311. 58. Gray, “Emily Dickinson” 37. 59. Dobson 53–4. 60. See, e.g., William Wordsworth’s “Essay Supplementary to the Preface,” Lyrical Ballads (1815). 61. Morrison 37–8. 62. Elizabeth A. Petrino, Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America, 1820–1885 (Hanover and London: UP of New England, 1998), chapters 1 and 2. 63. Shira Wolosky, Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1984). 64. Sanchez-Eppler 123. 65. Paula Bennett, My Life a Loaded Gun: Dickinson, Plath, Rich, and Female Creativity (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1986) 52–3. 66. Paula Bennett, “Critical Clitoridectomy: Female Sexual Imagery and Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory,” Signs 18:2 (Winter 1993): 235–59. 67. Paula Bernat Bennett has recently written of the moment when she recognized the racism in “The Malay–took the Pearl” and, for two years, could not teach Dickinson’s poetry. The recognition came as Bennett immersed herself in the study of other, more politically astute nineteenth-century American women poets. Admitting that “The Malay” may not be “‘about’ race at all,” given Dickinson’s penchant for ambiguity, she nevertheless situates Dickinson’s poem amid the racial typology that pervaded nineteenth-century American literature and supported the myths of racial modernity. Bennett, “‘The Negro never knew’: Emily Dickinson and Racial Typology in the Nineteenth Century,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 19:1 (2002) 53–61. 68. Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001) 406.

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69. Mary Loeffelholz, Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1991), 26–8. 70. Jack L. Capps, Emily Dickinson’s Reading 1836–1886 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966) 81–2. Capps notes that Dickinson was seeking a copy of de Quincey’s Confessions in 1858. 71. Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821; London: Penguin Books, 1971) 90–2. 72. Sharon Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992); Smith, Rowing in Eden; R. W. Franklin, ed., The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1981). 73. Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson, v. 1 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1955) 349. Johnson cites the closing lines of the protagonist in part 1 of Browning’s Paracelsus. 74. Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979) 174. . “Skins May Differ”: Women’s Republicanism and the Poetics of Abolitionism 1. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985) 122–46. 2. See chapter 2 for a discussion of terms such as “women’s culture,” “female public sphere,” “female republicanism,” “female public culture,” “female literary culture.” These are not intended to be either mutually distinct or entirely interchangeable, though they represent many of the same historical practices; and no one of these terms signifies a wholly consistent set of beliefs or actions. 3. Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1989) 3–26. 4. Glenna Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place in the United States, 1630–1970 (New York: Oxford UP, 1992) 53. 5. Nicole Tonkovich, “Rhetorical Power in the Victorian Parlor: Godey’s Lady’s Book and the Gendering of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric,” in Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran, eds., Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993) 158f. 6. Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of NineteenthCentury American Women Editors (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995) 80–2. 7. Okker 80–2. 8. Fogel 252–4; Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833; rpt. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1996). 9. Okker 82–4. 10. Okker 78–80. 11. John B. Pickard, ed., The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, v. 1 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1975) 374. 12. Pickard 73.

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13. Sarah Josepha Hale, Woman’s Record (New York, 1854) 680. 14. Frances Smith Foster, introduction, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster (New York: Feminist Press at the City U of New York, 1990). 15. Fogel 323. 16. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) 369. 17. Julia Markus, Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 92–4, 96–7, 106–7. 18. Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (Charlottesville and London: UP of Virginia, 1992) 97–102. 19. Dorothy Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1989) 156–7. 20. Proceedings (New York, 1837) 14; cited in Yellin 5. 21. Yellin 10. 22. Joan Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill, ed. Michael Moon and Cathy N. Davidson (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995) 111. 23. Yellin 15. 24. The earliest use of this sense of “fair” cited in the OED is from Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (published 1791–98), while the meaning “beautiful” dates back at least to the Renaissance. 25. Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1845) is well known and much anthologized. Eliza Follen’s poem “For the Fourth of July” appeared in her Poems (Boston, 1839); see Janet Gray, She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997) 5. 26. Foster, introduction, A Brighter Coming Day, 4, 6, 15. Foster cites Phebe A. Hanaford, Daughters of America (Augusta, Maine, 1882) 326 and William Wells Brown, The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863) 525. 27. Mary Loeffelholz, “Maria Lowell’s ‘Africa’ and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘The Sphinx’: Poetry, Slavery and Personification,” presentation on the panel “Redeeming Significance: Poetry and Poetic Strategy,” Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers in the Twenty-First Century, May 30–June 2, 1996, Trinity College, Hartford, CT. 28. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford UP, 1986) 106. 29. Nancy Bentley, “White Slaves: The Mulatto Hero in Antebellum Fiction,” Moon and Davidson 198ff. 30. Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986) 11–2. 31. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1993) 17. 32. Morrison 39. 33. Kerber 285.

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34. See, e.g., Karen Sanchez-Eppler’s discussion, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition,” Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993) 14–49. . The Mummy Returns: Humor, Kinship, and the Bindings of Print 1. Hannah Flagg Gould, Poems (Boston, 1832). 2. Table of contents, Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 1 (1820) 10. 3. Transactions 320. 4. Transactions 325. 5. Letter from Dr. Mitchill to Samuel M. Burnside, secretary of the American Antiquarian Society, August 24, 1815, 318–21; extract of letter from John H. Farnham, 355–61; letter from Charles Wilkins to Samuel M. Burnside, October 2, 1817, 361–4, Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 1 (1820). 6. Lora Romero, “Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire, and New Historicism,” Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill, ed. Michael Moon and Cathy N. Davidson (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995) 93. The “vanishing American” myth also anticipates recapitulation theory, whose implication in turn-of-the-century ideas about childhood is discussed in chapter 9. 7. E.g., Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” both first printed in 1836, the same year that Gould’s mummy poem was published. 8. Nancy A. Walker, A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988). 9. “Hannah Flagg Gould,” The Dictionary of American Biography, v. 7 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931) 452. 10. Sarah Josepha Hale, Woman’s Record (New York, 1854) 680. 11. Rufus Griswold, The Female Poets of America (Philadelphia, 1849, 1860) 45. 12. Richard Brodhead, “Veiled Ladies: Toward a History of Antebellum Entertainment,” Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Ninteenth-Century America (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1993) 48–68. 13. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17 (Summer 1987): 74. . Looking in the Glass: Sarah Piatt’s Poetics of Play and Loss 1. First published in Harper’s Magazine, these poems are collected in the posthumously collected Selected Poems (New Orleans: Green Shutter Book Shop, 1927). 2. See, e.g., Cheryl Walker’s headnote to a selection of Lambert’s poetry in American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1992) 301–2. See Janet Gray, “Passing as Fact: Mollie E. Lambert and Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert Meet as Racial Modernity Dawns,” Representations 64 (November 1998) 41–75, for my discussion of the misattribution and its implications, incorporating much of the discussion of Lambert in chapter 7.

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3. Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 117. See chapter 1 for a discussion of Zizek’s theory and its application to poetics. Most of the questions in this paragraph are derived from Timothy Robins’s review of literature, “Remembering the Future: The Cultural Study of Memory,” Theorizing Culture: An Interdisciplinary Critique after Postmodernism, ed. Barbara Adam and Stuart Allan (New York: New York UP, 1995) 201–13. 4. William Morton Payne, “Recent Poetry,” Dial 6:69 (1886): 251. 5. Payne 251. 6. Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt, ed. Paula Bernat Bennett (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2001). 7. I return to the construction of childhood and St. Nicholas in chapter 9. 8. Mary Mapes Dodge, “Children’s Magazines,” Scribner’s (July, 1873): 352–4. 9. Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), chapter 4, especially pp. 323–47. 10. Zizek 168. 11. See Wilma King, chapter 3, “‘When Day Is Done’: Play and Leisure,” Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995), 43–65, on cross-racial play in slavery. The black playmate in Piatt’s story would have been under twelve years of age, since cross-racial play ended when slave children became workers at about age ten to twelve; King emphasizes that slave children rarely knew their precise ages. 12. King, 44, emphasizes the imaginative value to slave children of “pretending to be white,” saying through play, “I’m not a slave any more.” 13. Piatt made light revisions to this poem after its publication in Wide-Awake. In the first published version, which Bennett includes in The Palace-Burner (pp. 114–6), Piatt ascribes the ancestral portrait to “Raphael, for all I care!” The speaker is more overt in her disdain for her family’s elite origins. 14. S. M. B. Piatt, “My Old Kentucky Nurse,” in John Greenleaf Whittier, ed., Songs of Three Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1875) 303–4. 15. K. Sue Jewell offers a compact visual description of the Mammy stereotype in From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of U.S. Social Policy (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) 39. 16. King, 94–7, discusses the severe physical punishments that slave children received from masters and mistresses alike, particularly for failing at their child-care duties. Many slave parents, too, severely punished their children, perhaps to protect them from even harsher treatment by their owners. King describes slave childhood as a “war zone.” 17. Palace-Burner 42. 18. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845; Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1960) 36–7. 19. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Hymns of the Negro,” Atlantic Monthly 19: 685.

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. We Women Radicals: Frances Harper’s Poetics of Racial Formation 1. Harper’s Complete Poems, for example, have been available since 1988 in an edition prepared by Maryemma Graham for Oxford University Press’s Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. 2. J. Saunders Redding, “Let Freedom Ring,” To Make a Poet Black (1939; rpt. Great Neck, New York: Core Collection Books, 1978) 42–3. 3. Joan R. Sherman, Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century (2d ed., Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1989) 73–4. 4. Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911 (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1994) 151. 5. Kevin Gaines, in Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1996) 20, credits historian Rayford Logan with initiating the now common use of the term “the nadir” to refer to this period; Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 (New York: Dial Press, 1954). 6. Elizabeth Young, “Warring Fictions: Iola Leroy and the Color of Gender,” in Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill, ed. Michael Moon and Cathy N. Davidson (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995) 294–5. 7. Frances Smith Foster, introduction, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster (New York: Feminist Press at the City U of New York, 1990) 19. 8. Simeon was an old man who recognized the infant Jesus as the Christ when Mary and Joseph brought him to the temple, Luke 2:25ff. 9. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992) 52. 10. Morrison 17. 11. Reggie Young, “Black Stereotypes,” and Lucinda H. MacKethan, “Plantation Tradition,” Oxford Companion to African American Literature, ed. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris (New York: Oxford UP, 1997) 699, 579–82. 12. Harper’s serialized novel “Minnie’s Sacrifice,” published in the Christian Recorder in 1869, is the story of a cultivated mulatta teacher who is lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. Frances E. W. Harper, “Minnie’s Sacrifice,” “Sowing annd Reaping,” “Trial and Triumph”: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper, ed. Frances Smith Foster (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994) 1–92. 13. See, for example, the epilogues to her novels, Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (1892; rpt. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988) 282, and “Minnie’s Sacrifice,” 90–1. . What One Is Not Was: Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert’s Poetics of Self-Reconstruction 1. I. N. Phelps Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, v. 5 (New York: R. H. Dodd, 1915–28) 1932.

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2. Joan R. Sherman, ed., Collected Black Women’s Poetry, v. 1 (New York: Oxford UP, 1988). 3. Database of African American Poetry 1760–1900 (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healy, 1995). 4. Mrs. N. F. Mossell, The Work of the Afro-American Woman (1894; rpt. New York: Oxford UP, 1988) 78. 5. Janet Gray, “Passing as Fact: Mollie E. Lambert and Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert Meet as Racial Modernity Dawns,” Representations 64 (November 1998): 41–75. 6. ”Tucker, Mary Eliza,” James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, v. 5, 173–4. 7. See, e.g., Glenna Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place in the United States, 1530–1970 (New York: Oxford UP, 1992) 156. 8. See e.g. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Scarlett O’Hara: The Southern Lady as New Woman,” Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the American Past, ed. Catherine Clinton (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1994) 154–79. 9. Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1970) 118ff. 10. A. Thomas Cole, “Satire,” New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993) 1114–6. 11. While these themes are notably Dickensian (the burden of the interminable suit Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce in Bleak House [1852]), popular American women writers also addressed the theme of women’s and children’s vulnerability in an uncaring marketplace—e.g. Fanny Fern in Ruth Hall (1854)—anticipating turn-of-the-century naturalism, particularly Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). 12. Deborah Gray White, “Female Slaves: Sex Roles and Status in the Antebellum Plantation South,” Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the American Past, ed. Catherine Clinton (Durham: Duke UP, 1994) 61. 13. Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall, and Trevor I. Williams, A History of Technology, v. 5, The Late Nineteenth Century, c. 1850–c. 1900 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958) 589–90. The Wilcox and Gibbs machine Tucker describes was patented in 1856. 14. Leeann Whites, “The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender,” Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford UP, 1992) 17. Women of Milledgeville, Georgia, where Lambert lived, were exceptionally active; Catherine Clinton, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984) 86. 15. Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 117. 16. See, e.g., the introduction to Clinton, Half Sisters 1–17. 17. Among Lambert’s Poems (1867) is one in which a divorced mother grieves about being given custody of only one of her two children. Lambert may have divorced her first husband, Tucker, when the Civil War impoverished him and she left for New York to seek her fortune.

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. Critical Positions in Racial Modernity: An Approach to Teaching 1. An invisible observer of the public world, she is a counterpart to the flâneur, squarely situated in the kind of modernity that has become canonical through, for example, Walter Benjamin’s Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1976). 2. Nell Irwin Painter, “Sojourner Truth, a Life, a Symbol,” colloquium of the Center for the Study of American Religions, Princeton University, March 15, 1996. 3. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1996) 70. 4. Russ Castronovo discusses the Gettysburg Address in this light in “Radical Configurations of History in the Era of American Slavery,” Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Ooronoko to Anita Hill, ed. Michael Moon and Cathy N. Davidson (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995) 169–94. 5. Gaines, especially chapter 1, “From Freedom to Slavery: Uplift and the Decline of Black Politics” 19–46. 6. Brian Doyle, discussing the social theory of Anthony Giddens, in “Changing the Culture of Cultural Studies,” Theorizing Culture: An Interdisciplinary Critique after Postmodernism, ed. Barbara Adam and Stuart Allan (New York: New York UP, 1995) 177. 7. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Penguin, 1989). 8. Gaines 74. 9. Du Bois 153. 10. Melba Joyce Boyd reads the characterizations in Iola Leroy in this way; Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911 (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1994) 152–6. 11. John Grisham, A Time to Kill (New York: Doubleday, 1993). 12. Doyle 177. 13. Fred Botting discussing Lacan in “Culture, Subjectivity and the Real; or, Psychoanalysis Reading Postmodernity,” Theorizing Culture: An Interdisciplinary Critique after Postmodernism, ed. Barbara Adam and Stuart Allan (New York: New York UP, 1995) 89–90. 14. Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury Press, 1970) 36. 15. Freire 34. 16. Adapted from Deborah L. Flick, From Debate to Dialogue: Using the Understanding Process to Transform Our Conversations (Boulder, CO: Orchid Publications, 1998) 9–10. 17. Megan Boler, Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (New York: Routledge, 1999) 200. 18. Freire 71.

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. The Containment of Childhood: Reproducing Consumption in American Children’s Verse 1. See, e.g., Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968). 2. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1989). 3. Sarah Josepha Hale, Woman’s Record (New York, 1854) 680. 4. Lydia Maria Child, The Mother’s Book (Boston, 1831) 3, 9. 5. In Janet Gray, She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997) 111–2. 6. John Hollander, ed., American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, v. 1 (New York: Library of America, 1993) 70, 251. 7. Hollander 44–5. See chapter 2, note 12, on the controversy surrounding Moore’s authorship. 8. Gray, She Wields a Pen 164–5. 9. Hollander 558–60, 401–2, 476–8. 10. Hugh Haughton, ed., The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988). 11. Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978) 15. 12. Stewart 6. 13. Stewart 203. 14. Geoffrey Grigson mentions Maria Edgeworth’s use of such mnemonics in his introduction to The Faber Book of Nonsense Verse (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1979) 14. 15. Haughton 104–5, 116–7. 16. Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Akzente, 1958; reprinted in Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature, v. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 53. 17. W. H. Auden, ed., The Oxford Book of Light Verse (London: Oxford UP, 1938); cited by Haughton in the epigram to The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry. 18. Cited in Haughton, epigram. 19. Stewart 12. 20. Copies of the nineteenth-century texts of these poems, which vary from today’s best-known versions, are in the appendix. 21. Stewart 66. 22. Sarah Josepha Hale, Three Hours; or, The Vigil of Love; and Other Poems (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1848). 23. From Follen’s preface dated March 22, 1856: “Two captivating little songs, by some unknown hand, appended to the English edition, are retained; and two or three from the first American edition, omitted in the English, are restored.” A line separates

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“The Three Little Kittens” and “Cocks and Hens,” listed at the end, from other titles in the table of contents. 24. Sarah Josepha Hale, Three Hours; or, The Vigil of Love; and Other Poems (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1848). 25. Child calls Mother Goose “absurd nonsense”; 98. 26. Fanny tells her stern friend: “Ashamed of nonsense, Amy! Why, I am in love with it. It is as important as my daily bread to me. All other pleasures, all other friends, are uncertain, unfaithful; but nonsense always more than fulfils its promise, and is an unfailing help in adversity.” Eliza Lee Follen, Sketches of Married Life, rev. ed. (Boston: Samuel G. Simpkins & Hilliard, Gray, & Co., 1841) 34. Follen, “Lines on Nonsense,” in Gray, She Wields a Pen, 3–4 (originally published in Mrs. [Eliza] Lee Follen, Poems [Boston: William Crosby & Co., 1839]). Eliza Lee Follen, The Well-Spent Hour, new ed. (Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1848) 129. 27. Anne M. Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790–1880 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988). 28. Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) 186–7. 29. Boylan 149. 30. Gloria T. Delamar, Mother Goose: From Nursery to Literature (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1987). 31. Delamar 31. 32. At least one of the countless parodies of “Mary’s Lamb” takes up Mary’s maternity: “Mary had a little lamb, / The doctor was surprised, / But when Old MacDonald had a farm, / The doctor nearly died.” 33. Robert Frost, “Design,” The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969) 302. I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth— Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth— A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?— If design govern in a thing so small. (1922, 1936) 34. Delamar 181.

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35. Frank Zappa, “Cyclophony,” The Steve Allen Show (syndicated, 14 March 1963). 36. Mary A. Lathbury, “The Trio,” St. Nicholas: Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys 1 (March, 1874): 283. 37. “The Letter Box,” St. Nicholas: Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys 1 (April, 1874): 373. 38. Janet Gray, “Popular Poetry,” Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Eric Haralson (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998) 347–52; Mrs. M. L. Rayne, What Can a Woman Do: Or, Her Position in the Business and Literary World (Petersburgh, NY: Eagle Publishing Co., 1893) 159–68. 39. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford UP, 1986) 106. 40. Margaret Eytinge, “The Bee and the Butterfly,” St. Nicholas: Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys 1 (January, 1874): 168. 41. Mary Mapes Dodge, “Jingles,”St. Nicholas: Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys 1 (November, 1873): 6. 42. In Mary Mapes Dodge, Rhymes and Jingles (New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1875) 6. 43. Mary Mapes Dodge, “Children’s Magazines,” Scribner’s (July, 1873): 352–4. 44. Susan R. Gannon and Ruth Anne Thompson, Mary Mapes Dodge (New York: Twayne, 1993) 76. 45. Gannon and Thompson 129, citing Dodge. 46. Mary Mapes Dodge, Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1916) 74. 47. Dodge, Hans Brinker 73. 48. Dodge, Hans Brinker 274. 49. Nissenbaum 266, citing Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston, 1845) 74–5. 50. Gray, “Popular Poetry” 350. 51. See chapter 2, note 12. 52. Nissenbaum 64–5. 53. Nissenbaum 202–11. 54. Nissenbaum 126–31. 55. William Cullen Bryant, “The Eagle and the Serpent,” St Nicholas 1 (July, 1874): 506. 56. Gannon and Thompson 88. 57. Dodge, “Children’s Magazines” 352. 58. Edith M. Thomas compared the cry of an immigrant newsboy to a bird call in “Cries of the Newsboy” (1893); see Gray, She Wields a Pen 235–6. 59. “Jack-in-the-Pulpit,” St. Nicholas: Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys 1 (December, 1873): 100. 60. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992) 37–8. 61. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthro-

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pology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904) vii, viii, xiv. 62. Hall vi. 63. Hall xi–xiii. 64. Hall vii, x. 65. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1995) 106–7. 66. Hall 648–748. 67. Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995) vii. 68. “The Letter Box,” St. Nicholas: Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys 1 (June, 1874): 478. 69. Bederman 77–120. 70. Bederman 110–20. 71. Lizzie W. Champney, “How Persimmons Took Cah ob der Baby,” St. Nicholas: Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys 1 (May, 1874): 420–2. The text of this poem is provided in full in the appendix. 72. K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of U.S. Social Policy (New York: Routledge, 1993) 45. 73. See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2d ed., New York: Routledge, 2000) 77. 74. Stewart 78, 88, 120 on these attributes of nonsense and play: flaunted incompetence, rigid adherence to chosen rules. 75. King vii. 76. Stewart 119. 77. Stewart 209. 78. Stewart 5. 79. Carrie Mae Weems, “Mirror Mirror,” reproduced in Andrea Kirsh and Susan Fisher Sterling, Carrie Mae Weems (Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1993) pl. 11. 80. Stewart 109.

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Index

abolition, 21, 22, 28, 29, 34, 46, 63–5, 67–9, 71–3, 81, 85, 89, 98, 99, 103, 110, 115, 117, 121, 122, 124, 128, 129, 131, 132, 140, 141, 143, 157, 194, 227. See also antislavery Adorno, Theodor, 11–3, 191 Africanism, 31, 35, 42, 46, 54–6, 83, 139, 223, 227, 231, 232 Allen, Elizabeth Akers: “Rock Me to Sleep,” 53, 189 American Antiquarian Society, 3, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 94 antebellum, 7, 20–2, 27–9, 39, 40, 47, 48, 53, 54, 85, 99, 103–5, 107, 119, 123, 125, 131, 132, 143, 144, 155, 161, 165, 167, 185, 192, 201, 202, 224, 227, 232 antislavery, 4, 21, 22, 24, 25, 29, 65–7, 71–3, 84, 86, 97, 232 Armstrong, Isobel, 68 Auden, W. H., 191 Baldwin, James, 15–8, 22 Bannerji, Himani, 6, 8, 14, 15, 22 Bederman, Gail, 222 Bennett, Paula Bernat, 39, 56, 106, 299n, 303 blackness, 5, 20, 27, 33, 78, 114, 139, 141, 157, 165, 187, 227, 231 Boler, Megan, 180 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10, 16, 17 Boyd, Melba Joyce, 127 Boylan, Anne M., 195 Brodhead, Richard, 96 Brogan, T. V. F., 9, 10

Brown, William Wells, 76 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 106, 152; “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” 28, 68–71, 75, 77, 78, 80–2, 85 Browning, Robert, 58, 113–4 Bryant, William Cullen, 217; “Thanatopsis,” 39–41, 221 Burgess, Frank Gelett: “ELIZABETH: A Gloomy Story, / (Perhaps it is an Allegory),” 33, 42–3; “The Purple Cow,” 33, 37, 42, 43, 189, 228 Cameron, Sharon, 5, 11, 12, 17 Carryl, Charles, 189 Champney, Lizzie W.: “How Persimmons Took Cah ob der Baby,” 31, 104, 223–30, 288–92 Chandler, Elizabeth Margaret: “The Kneeling Slave,” 67, 73–6, 78, 79, 83, 84, 121, 157, 237 Child, Lydia Maria: An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called African, 21, 22, 65; The Mother’s Book, 188, 193 Chomsky, Noam, 191 Civil War, 20, 34, 53, 55, 65, 109, 127, 129, 139, 141, 148, 154, 158, 161, 189, 224 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 191 Collins, Patricia Hill, 24 Cooper, James Fenimore, 89 Coultrap-McQuin, Susan, 45 Davis, Mollie E. Moore, 104, 108 de Quincey, Thomas, 56 Dickinson, Emily, 11, 27, 37–40, 49–69;

322 “The Malay–took the Pearl,” 55–69, 299n; “Publication–is the Auction,” 53–4 didacticism, 31, 38, 127, 200, 204, 205, 208, 210, 218, 226, 227 Dobson, Joanne, 51, 53 Dodson, Howard, 25 Dodge, Mary Mapes, 31, 107, 199, 206–8, 221, 223, 227; Hans Brinker, 210–12; “The Mayor of Scuttleton,” 201, 208–9, 288; “Poor Crow,” 219–20; “Shepherd John,” 200, 282; “Taking Time to Grow,” 215–20, 222; “The Way to Do It,” 202, 203, 220, 222, 223, 283–4; “The Wooden Horse,” 203–5, 285–6 Douglas, Ann, 48, 298n Douglass, Frederick, 75, 122, 212–3 DuBois, W. E. B., 26, 172–3 emancipation, 7, 8, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28, 29, 32, 46, 53, 55, 56, 58, 81, 104, 105, 108, 117, 131, 132, 134, 136, 137, 139, 141, 144, 157, 212, 218, 224 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 23–26, 37, 39, 40, 49 Erkkila, Betsy, 51, 54 Faulkner, William, 22 femininity, 29, 30, 46, 48, 73, 81, 93, 106, 112, 114, 165, 185, 228 Field, Eugene, 37, 189 folk, 31, 34, 35, 39, 42, 52, 68, 123, 127, 144, 185–7, 195, 200, 210, 221, 223, 231 Follen, Eliza Lee, 31, 75, 191–6, 216, 233, 307–8n Forten, Sarah Louisa: “An Appeal to Women,” 67, 73–6, 78, 79, 83, 84, 88, 113, 121, 237–8 Foster, Frances Smith, 67, 76 Franklin, R. W., 55, 56 Freire, Paolo, 176 Frost, Robert, 188, 308n Gaines, Kevin, 171, 172

Index Gannon, Susan R., 210, 217 Garrison, William Lloyd, 65, 66, 71, 79 Gilbert, Sandra, 50 Godey’s Ladies Book, 47, 64, 65, 169 Godey, Louis, 65 Gould, Hannah Flagg, 4–8, 15, 19, 22, 28, 32, 66, 67, 106, 120, 123, 143, 201, 215–6; “Apprehension,” 203–4, 284; “The Butterfly’s Dream,” 206–8, 286–7; “The Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy,” 3–5, 7, 11, 17, 18, 21, 31, 70, 85–100, 112, 119, 185–7, 191, 192, 203–4, 210, 241–2; “The Slave Mother’s Prayer,” 70, 76–85, 88, 94, 97, 98, 139, 204, 240–1 Griswold, Rufus, 93 Gubar, Susan, 50 Habegger, Alfred, 56 Habermas, Jurgen, 186 Hale, Sarah Josepha, 31, 47, 48, 64–67, 83, 98, 187, 192–4, 196–8, 200, 205, 206, 217; “Mary’s Lamb,” 192, 195, 197–9, 281–2 Hall, G. Stanley: Adolescence, 31, 220–3, 227, 229, 244 Hanaford, Phebe, 76 Harmon, William: The Top 500 Poems, 37, 49, 52 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 39; “Aunt Chloe,” 7, 103–5, 125, 127–45, 146, 148, 168, 169, 171, 172, 175–7, 227, 246–60; Iola Leroy, 128–30, 142, 172, 173, 176; “The Slave Mother,” 67, 76–79, 81, 83, 84, 132, 141, 238–9 Harrington, Joseph, 36, 37 Harris, Joel Chandler, 108 The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 39, 40 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 122 Hollander, John, 40 hooks, bell, 19 Howe, Julia Ward: “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” 40, 53

Index Jameson, Frederic, 30 Jewell, K. Sue, 228, 303n Jezebel stereotype, 4, 6, 19, 100 Johnson, James Weldon, 39 Johnson, Thomas H., 58 Keats, John, 191 Kerber, Linda: Women of the Republic, 44, 45, 84 Koopman, Harry Lyman, 50 Lambert, Mary Eliza Tucker, 8; Loew’s Bridge: A Broadway Idyl, 7, 28–30, 104, 105, 127, 130, 139, 146–67, 170–7, 231, 232, 260–80 Larcom, Lucy, 188 Lathbury, Mary A., 199 Lauter, Paul, 9, 10 Lazarus, Emma: “The New Colossus,” 40 Leighton, Angela, 70 The Liberator, 66, 71, 73, 77, 82, 83 Loeffelholz, Mary, 56 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 39, 40 Lorde, Audre, 34 Lothrop, Daniel, 107, 108 lyric, 5, 11–13, 18, 19, 27, 28, 32, 46, 59, 82, 117, 126, 129, 142, 146 Mammy stereotype, 18, 19, 24, 115, 177, 227 Markus, Julia, 69 Matthews, Glenna, 64 Matthiessen, F. O., 38–40, 49, 107, 194 Melville, Herman, 40: Moby Dick, 198 Mermin, Dorothy, 70 Michaels, Walter Benn: Our America, 13, 14 miscegenation, 19, 72, 98, 140, 160, 166 Mitchill, Samuel, 87 modernism, 11, 38–40, 47, 52, 122, 146, 170, 187, 203 modernity, 5, 6, 14, 20, 22, 24, 25, 30–2, 34, 35, 42, 44, 45, 48, 83, 84, 105, 142, 148, 158, 163–6, 168–73, 185, 190, 194, 204, 220, 221. See also racial modernity Moore, Clement Clark, 189, 212, 297n

323 Morris, George Pope, 189 Morris, Timothy, 50 Morrison, Toni, 22, 33, 34, 41, 46, 54, 78, 83, 139, 220, 232 Moser, J. H., 108–9 Mossell, N. F., 147 Mother Goose, 31, 192, 195, 196 Native American, 40, 41, 89, 108, 198 “New Woman”/new womanhood, 105, 109, 147–8, 155–8 Nissenbaum, Stephen, 194, 212–4, 297n nonsense, 4, 8, 31, 32, 48, 97, 186, 190–5, 197, 200, 208, 219, 220, 229–34 nostalgia, 12, 23, 44, 104, 116, 143, 158, 171, 190, 204 Okker, Patricia, 65 Osgood, Frances, 39 Ostriker, Alicia Suskin, 51 The Oxford Book of American Verse, 38, 49 Painter, Nell, 170 pedagogy, 30, 168–81 Perrault, Charles, 195 Pestalozzi, Johann, 194, 195, 213 Piatt, John James, 107 Piatt, Sarah Morgan Bryan, 8; “A Child’s Party (in Kentucky, AD 185–),” 7, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 103–26, 127, 130, 131, 135, 139, 142, 143, 146, 157, 164, 165, 168–71, 175–7, 185, 186, 191, 192, 212, 220, 227, 228, 231, 242–6; “My Old Kentucky Nurse,” 114–6; “The Old Slave Music,” 121–2 plantation literature and traditions, 8, 104, 108, 109, 125, 141, 142, 232 Poe, Edgar Allen, 13, 37–40, 194 poetics, 8–10, 12, 13, 20, 29, 30, 34, 37, 49, 66, 71, 75, 123, 152, 168, 170, 173, 187, 190, 192 postbellum, 7, 8, 20–2, 28, 30–2, 36, 38– 40, 46, 47, 53, 55, 65, 105, 108, 119, 120, 123, 125, 131, 150, 152, 164, 165, 168, 169, 171, 187, 188, 202

324 race and time, 3, 5, 8, 19–20, 26, 27, 31, 175, 181, 185, 234 racial modernity, 7–9, 11, 19, 21, 24, 25, 27–32, 53, 58, 87, 89, 103, 126, 139, 165, 172, 187, 299n Ray, Henrietta Cordelia, 104 Reconstruction, 103, 121, 129, 141, 165, 166, 172, 227 Reese, Lizette Woodworth, 187 republican mother/motherhood, 44–47, 140, 166, 185, 188, 193, 194, 197, 205, 218, 227 republicanism, 28, 29, 35, 36, 63–9, 75, 82, 96, 98, 99, 103, 123, 124, 140, 171, 202–4 Rich, Adrienne, 51 Romanticism, 23, 31, 32, 41, 48, 49, 51, 54, 85, 152, 161, 163, 191, 192, 194, 195, 201, 205, 206, 213, 214, 216, 218, 221, 222, 227, 233 Romero, Lora, 89 Sanchez-Eppler, Karen, 27, 46, 56 Sapphire stereotype, 6, 19, 129, 138, 142, 144, 227, 228, 230 Schiller, Friedrich, 23 Scott, Anne Firor, 148 sentimentality, 25, 48, 63, 73–5, 77, 78, 116, 117, 119, 120, 122, 124, 133, 142, 146, 148–50, 152–5, 165, 226 She Wields a Pen, 3, 7 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 69 Sherman, Joan R., 127 Sherrard, Virginia B., 171 Sidney, Margaret, 108–9 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, 39 Smith, Martha Nell, 51 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 27, 37–39, 47, 48, 53 stereotypes, 6, 8, 115–9, 21, 31–3, 42, 100, 115, 116, 125, 141, 171, 172, 219, 220, 222, 226, 228, 232–4. See also Jezebel; Mammy; Sapphire Stewart, James Brewer, 7

Index Stewart, Susan, 190–2, 194, 230–2, 234 St. Nicholas, 31, 107, 108, 199, 201, 202, 207, 210, 212, 214, 217, 219, 223, 226, 231 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 15, 16, 46, 128, 129, 132, 136, 141, 160, 227 Sundquist, Eric, 14, 26 teaching methods, 30, 168–81. See also pedagogy temporal divide, 5, 7, 20, 25, 26, 29, 105, 132, 155, 174, 185, 190 terror, 15, 18, 19, 24, 54, 76–83, 126 Thayer, Ernest L., 189 Thomas, Edith M., 187 Thompson, Ruth Anne, 210, 217 Tompkins, Jane, 10, 16, 17 Truth, Sojourner, 70 Walker, Cheryl, 49–51 Walker, Nancy A., 93 Walker, Sheila S., 25 Watts, Emily Stipes, 47, 48, 51, 53 Weems, Carrie Mae, 6, 233 White, E. B., 198 whiteness, 5, 7, 15, 20, 27, 30, 33, 34, 41, 53–5, 58, 59, 69, 76, 78, 97, 105, 108, 111, 126, 138, 139, 141, 145, 147, 148, 157, 158, 165, 167, 175, 176, 186, 187, 198 Whitman, Walt, 27, 37–40, 152 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 38–40, 66, 114 Wide-Awake, 107–9, 120 Wolosky, Shira, 56 womanhood, 29, 72, 75, 78, 97, 112, 114, 124, 148, 155, 161, 170, 171, 174 Woodworth, Samuel, 189 Wordsworth, William, 68, 81, 188, 221 Yellin, Jean Fagan, 46, 64, 71, 72 Zizek, Slavoj, 18, 22, 104, 105, 110, 161