Pub Date : 2021-05-21DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0006
H. Murray
Odd forms of speech permeate Herman Melville’s fiction, from the strange tongue of Polynesian natives in Typee, to Billy Budd’s broken stuttering. This chapter examines a movement towards silence and wordlessness to express liminality in Melville’s later fiction. Pierre’s otherworldly Isabel Banford gives voice to her social isolation and familial exclusion through shrieks and a spirit-possessed guitar, influenced by the cultural phenomenon of spiritualism. Cadaverous Bartleby is a ghostly figure whose verbal refusals and withdrawals from conversation disavow ideals of the professional White male tied to sociality and self-making. In response to these unusual utterances, Pierre and the narrator of ‘Bartleby’ turn Isabel and Bartleby into dependent figures that define their own formation of White male civic identity as providers and protectors. Melville explores how one can move beyond language to testify experience, both in his characters’ strange voices and in his own wrestling with language and writing itself in his later fiction.
{"title":"‘How can I speak to thee?’: Herman Melville’s Muted Voice","authors":"H. Murray","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Odd forms of speech permeate Herman Melville’s fiction, from the strange tongue of Polynesian natives in Typee, to Billy Budd’s broken stuttering. This chapter examines a movement towards silence and wordlessness to express liminality in Melville’s later fiction. Pierre’s otherworldly Isabel Banford gives voice to her social isolation and familial exclusion through shrieks and a spirit-possessed guitar, influenced by the cultural phenomenon of spiritualism. Cadaverous Bartleby is a ghostly figure whose verbal refusals and withdrawals from conversation disavow ideals of the professional White male tied to sociality and self-making. In response to these unusual utterances, Pierre and the narrator of ‘Bartleby’ turn Isabel and Bartleby into dependent figures that define their own formation of White male civic identity as providers and protectors. Melville explores how one can move beyond language to testify experience, both in his characters’ strange voices and in his own wrestling with language and writing itself in his later fiction.","PeriodicalId":414896,"journal":{"name":"Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction","volume":"48 8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132756347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-21DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0007
H. Murray
Returning to the origin of critical whiteness studies, antebellum African American literature, this chapter examines how tenets of Whiteness are performative and arbitrary in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and their Friends. Assembling a cast of respectable free African American families and cunning and dishonest White men, Webb depicts Whiteness as a set of values not intrinsic to White bodies, and that the privileges Whiteness affords are not extended to Black Americans who embody those tenets. Influenced by the cross-racial oratory of his wife Mary E. Webb, Webb conveys the permeability of the colour line through episodes of White racial transformation and African American passing, and he shows White male anxieties that they could lose the privileges of Whiteness themselves. In the final section the chapter considers prescriptive Whiteness itself as deadly through deathbed speeches in The Garies and across early African American fiction.
{"title":"‘I’m making a white man of him’: Making and Breaking Whiteness in The Garies and their Friends","authors":"H. Murray","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Returning to the origin of critical whiteness studies, antebellum African American literature, this chapter examines how tenets of Whiteness are performative and arbitrary in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and their Friends. Assembling a cast of respectable free African American families and cunning and dishonest White men, Webb depicts Whiteness as a set of values not intrinsic to White bodies, and that the privileges Whiteness affords are not extended to Black Americans who embody those tenets. Influenced by the cross-racial oratory of his wife Mary E. Webb, Webb conveys the permeability of the colour line through episodes of White racial transformation and African American passing, and he shows White male anxieties that they could lose the privileges of Whiteness themselves. In the final section the chapter considers prescriptive Whiteness itself as deadly through deathbed speeches in The Garies and across early African American fiction.","PeriodicalId":414896,"journal":{"name":"Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124090527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-21DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0002
H. Murray
Charles Brockden Brown populates his gothic fiction with racially ambiguous characters to ask what constitutes national identity and who can be a citizen at a time when these concepts are shifting, unsettled and still contested. This chapter examines how Brown communicates liminal Whiteness through sensational ventriloquism, which marks marginalised White men as non-White noncitizens along the frontier. Through their unusual vocal abilities, itinerant Frank Carwin in Wieland and cognitively impaired Nick Handyside in ‘Somnambulism’ become less than White figures. Their transgressive cries disturb the senses of White middle class families who serve as prime fictional examples of rational White citizens in the early republic. Written as pieces of irrational yet instructive entertainment, Brown transcribes these disruptive and powerful speech acts within his fiction to test the senses and rationality of his republican heroines and gothic readers.
{"title":"‘A shriek so terrible!’: Charles Brockden Brown’s Sensational Ventriloquists","authors":"H. Murray","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Charles Brockden Brown populates his gothic fiction with racially ambiguous characters to ask what constitutes national identity and who can be a citizen at a time when these concepts are shifting, unsettled and still contested. This chapter examines how Brown communicates liminal Whiteness through sensational ventriloquism, which marks marginalised White men as non-White noncitizens along the frontier. Through their unusual vocal abilities, itinerant Frank Carwin in Wieland and cognitively impaired Nick Handyside in ‘Somnambulism’ become less than White figures. Their transgressive cries disturb the senses of White middle class families who serve as prime fictional examples of rational White citizens in the early republic. Written as pieces of irrational yet instructive entertainment, Brown transcribes these disruptive and powerful speech acts within his fiction to test the senses and rationality of his republican heroines and gothic readers.","PeriodicalId":414896,"journal":{"name":"Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133846047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-21DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0001
H. Murray
The Introduction sets out the concept of ‘liminal whiteness’ by discussing the fields of Critical Whiteness Studies and studies of liminality, and drawing together the three thematic spheres in which the book operates: Whiteness, the voice, and death, dying and the supernatural in the early United States. It argues that several authors imagine lost, negated and removed Whiteness to both challenge White civic values and express anxiety about social and racial mobility in the early US.
{"title":"Introduction: Inexplicable Voices – Liminal Whiteness in the Early United States","authors":"H. Murray","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"The Introduction sets out the concept of ‘liminal whiteness’ by discussing the fields of Critical Whiteness Studies and studies of liminality, and drawing together the three thematic spheres in which the book operates: Whiteness, the voice, and death, dying and the supernatural in the early United States. It argues that several authors imagine lost, negated and removed Whiteness to both challenge White civic values and express anxiety about social and racial mobility in the early US.","PeriodicalId":414896,"journal":{"name":"Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122398904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-21DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0008
H. Murray
Drawing together discussions of White citizenship throughout the book, the Coda examines the detachment between civic ideals and the individual White male in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man. The eponymous trickster’s vocal mimicry across racial identities, akin to the spiritualist medium, fractures the self-contained self-made White male citizen, while at the same time enacting the ultimate social freedom to transgress those borders. The book closes with a turn to liminal Whiteness in the contemporary moment. The early US imagination of becoming less than White continues in the language of oppression, replacement, and genocide that frames White supremacist ethno-nationalist anxieties of racial mobility in the contemporary United States.
{"title":"Coda: The Resurrection of Whiteness","authors":"H. Murray","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing together discussions of White citizenship throughout the book, the Coda examines the detachment between civic ideals and the individual White male in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man. The eponymous trickster’s vocal mimicry across racial identities, akin to the spiritualist medium, fractures the self-contained self-made White male citizen, while at the same time enacting the ultimate social freedom to transgress those borders. The book closes with a turn to liminal Whiteness in the contemporary moment. The early US imagination of becoming less than White continues in the language of oppression, replacement, and genocide that frames White supremacist ethno-nationalist anxieties of racial mobility in the contemporary United States.","PeriodicalId":414896,"journal":{"name":"Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128620781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-21DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0005
H. Murray
In his fantastical tales, Edgar Allan Poe employs scientific and medical experiments as narrative devices to voice anxieties of White male civic fragility. For Poe, the dying and dead body, in the hands of the doctor or scientist, offers an opportunity to both explore and exorcise fears of social exclusion and loss. Written in a context of early US graverobbing, Poe’s medical narratives realise the frightening possibility that White middle-class, educated or propertied man could also be controlled and manipulated in the name of medical progress. In subjecting his protagonists to near-death or fatal experiences, Poe asks what it means for citizens to lose their self-possession and instead become the property of others. Speaking of and protesting their suffering, the conscious voices of the dead and dying undermine the expectation of a rational and self-possessed early US citizenship represented by the professional White male doctor.
{"title":"‘I say to you that I am dead!’: Edgar Allan Poe’s Protesting Cadavers","authors":"H. Murray","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"In his fantastical tales, Edgar Allan Poe employs scientific and medical experiments as narrative devices to voice anxieties of White male civic fragility. For Poe, the dying and dead body, in the hands of the doctor or scientist, offers an opportunity to both explore and exorcise fears of social exclusion and loss. Written in a context of early US graverobbing, Poe’s medical narratives realise the frightening possibility that White middle-class, educated or propertied man could also be controlled and manipulated in the name of medical progress. In subjecting his protagonists to near-death or fatal experiences, Poe asks what it means for citizens to lose their self-possession and instead become the property of others. Speaking of and protesting their suffering, the conscious voices of the dead and dying undermine the expectation of a rational and self-possessed early US citizenship represented by the professional White male doctor.","PeriodicalId":414896,"journal":{"name":"Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125685553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-21DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0004
H. Murray
Robert Montgomery Bird boldly experiments with cross-racial transformation in his proto-science fiction fantasy Sheppard Lee. This chapter draws on archival research to read Sheppard Lee as textual blackface through two interwoven forms: blackface minstrelsy and the slave narrative. Sheppard’s liminal journey into and out of an African American enslaved corpse mirrors the paradoxical demarcation and transgression of racial boundaries set up in early blackface minstrelsy. This chapter argues that Sheppard’s minstrel-inspired inhabitation of Blackness and his ventriloquisation of the burgeoning slave narrative genre rejects cross-racial consciousness. Instead Bird mocks White civic values of industry and self-possession, while seeking to contain palpable threats of fluid and violent social and racial movement in Jacksonian America.
{"title":"‘What had become of me?’: Sheppard Lee’s Blackface Transformation","authors":"H. Murray","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Robert Montgomery Bird boldly experiments with cross-racial transformation in his proto-science fiction fantasy Sheppard Lee. This chapter draws on archival research to read Sheppard Lee as textual blackface through two interwoven forms: blackface minstrelsy and the slave narrative. Sheppard’s liminal journey into and out of an African American enslaved corpse mirrors the paradoxical demarcation and transgression of racial boundaries set up in early blackface minstrelsy. This chapter argues that Sheppard’s minstrel-inspired inhabitation of Blackness and his ventriloquisation of the burgeoning slave narrative genre rejects cross-racial consciousness. Instead Bird mocks White civic values of industry and self-possession, while seeking to contain palpable threats of fluid and violent social and racial movement in Jacksonian America.","PeriodicalId":414896,"journal":{"name":"Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115578709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-21DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0003
H. Murray
In his historical folk tales, Washington Irving makes colonial male characters ghostly by connecting them to the ‘vanishing Indian’ disappearing across the early nation. This chapter argues that Irving employs liminal White figures marked by spectral indigeneity to enshrine a colonial vision of hierarchical yet interdependent community and citizenship, itself vanishing in the early national period. Bracebridge Hall’s spectral men are relics of a past America, who protest the increasing professionalisation of White male citizens and the destruction of colonial communal structures. In his intertwined tales of colonial America and Georgian England, Irving is involved in a project of ‘spectral nostalgia’, reproducing scenes of supernatural storytelling and ghost stories as a means of rescuing and propagating these fading civic structures of relation and feeling.
{"title":"‘This is a story-telling age’: Spectral Nostalgia in Bracebridge Hall","authors":"H. Murray","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474481731.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"In his historical folk tales, Washington Irving makes colonial male characters ghostly by connecting them to the ‘vanishing Indian’ disappearing across the early nation. This chapter argues that Irving employs liminal White figures marked by spectral indigeneity to enshrine a colonial vision of hierarchical yet interdependent community and citizenship, itself vanishing in the early national period. Bracebridge Hall’s spectral men are relics of a past America, who protest the increasing professionalisation of White male citizens and the destruction of colonial communal structures. In his intertwined tales of colonial America and Georgian England, Irving is involved in a project of ‘spectral nostalgia’, reproducing scenes of supernatural storytelling and ghost stories as a means of rescuing and propagating these fading civic structures of relation and feeling.","PeriodicalId":414896,"journal":{"name":"Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130217227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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