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PERFORMING SELVES AND THE THEATRICAL IMAGINATION IN
ANTEBELLUM AMERICA: THE EXAMPLES OF ANNA CORA MOWA'IT,
P.T. BARNUM, AND NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

By

Eric I. Fretz

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English/ American Studies

1995

ABSTRACT

PERFORMING SELVES AND THE THEATRICAL IMAGINATION IN
ANTEBELLUM AMERICA: THE EXAMPLES OF ANNA CORA MOWA'IT,
P.T. BARNUM, AND NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

By

Eric I. Fretz

Ralph Ellison has called America a "land of maskers and jokers,"
remarking that "when American life is most American it is apt to be most
theatrical." Revolutionary and immediate post-Revolutionary society was
skeptical of malleable selfhood, considering it a threat to the good order of the
young republic. In Declaring Independence, Jay Fliegelman demonstrates
post-Revolutionary America's fear of theatrical selfhood and its attempt to
discover and employ a natural language that would reveal the sincere and
essential motivations of public speakers and mitigate, even preclude, the
duplicitous representation of self in the public sphere. Throughout the first
half of the nineteenth century Americans were concerned about the
possibilities and problems of theatrical selfhood. Through a literary and
cultural analysis of nineteenth-century America, I argue that by the middle of
the nineteenth century the threat of a theatrical, or malleable, self is being
celebrated, rather than reviled, in the material and literary expressions of
Americans. Theatrical selfhood, a product of a post-Calvinist, politically
liberal, and market-oriented society, is a stylized presentation of self that

challenges notions of "essential" selfhood and posits the possibility of a

dynamic and socially constructed subject. I argue that the texts of Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Anna Cora Mowatt, and RT. Barnum liberally employ narrative
devices and tropes of masking and disguising in order to experiment with a
dynamic sense of selfhood released from Cartesian essences. I am sensitive to
the contexts of culture and, in the first chapter, I use cultural phenomena
such as the invention of the daguerreotype, the popularity of mesmerism and
phrenology, and the development of department stores to illustrate ways in
which nineteenth-century Americans were experimenting with the
manipulation of their private selves into the public sphere of antebellum
culture. The sense of theatrical selfhood I am uncovering is a site of cultural
conflict between the private and public spheres. In subsequent chapters I
argue that Hawthorne, Mowatt, and Barnum engage in narrative
performances by negotiating the necessities and aspirations of their private
selves with the expectations of a sentimental and capitalist-based public

culture.

Copyright by
Eric I. Fretz
1994

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am equally grateful to Barry Gross and Peter Levine for their constant
support and encouragement throughout my graduate studies at Michigan
State. Barry's interest in the progress of my work and the quality of my
teaching has given me the confidence and energy to complete my degree and
this project in a timely fashion. Barry gave me the use of his office in Morrill
Hall, recommended me for many teaching awards and fellowships, and gave
me the opportunity of teaching his class on Jewish American literature when
he was on leave. He has been a model mentor. In addition to reading early
drafts of this dissertation and providing insightful comments, Peter took me
to conferences, Michigan State basketball games, and usually paid for lunch.

Steve Arch's critical comments and scholarly mind helped me to conceive
and develop this project. His seminars on Colonial and Revolutionary
American literature and the American Historical Imagination have made my
scholarly work more rigorous. I am also grateful to Jim McClintock, former
director of American Studies, who helped me acquire and sustain funding
throughout my graduate studies. Thank you Barry, Peter, Steve, and Jim.

My parents, David and Cheryl Fretz, have shared in all the joys and
frustrations that ten years of higher education has brought along. Thanks,
mom and dad, for all your emotional and financial support. I am especially
grateful to Shruti Vaidya and Paresh Malde for opening their home to me
and making me feel like a part of their family. Over countless dinners and

cups of tea we have developed enduring friendships. In addition to being a

good friend and fellow bibliophile, John Kinch read early drafts of this project
and shared his knowledge and love of nineteenth-century American
literature. Finally, thanks go to Troy Paino for being an excellent running

partner and American Studies colleague.

vi

Preface

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anna Cora Mowatt, and RT. Barnum were all born
after the turn of the eighteenth century. The oldest, Hawthorne, was born in
1804, and the youngest, Mowatt, was born 15 years later, in 1819. Barnum was
born in 1805. Each of the three did the major part of their life's work after
1826-the year of the death of Jefferson and Adams and the figural beginning
of the post-heroic age.1 United by this important fact, Hawthorne, Mowatt,
and Barnum lived their lives and wrote their narratives in the midst of a
culture that, by 1850, had developed a particular form of theatrical sensibility
Ms the Victorian cult of domesticity.

The following essays are inquiries into the dynamics of theatrical selfhood
in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America. Chapter One clearly defines
the model of theatrical selfhood I am expounding at the same time as it
provides a broad view of nineteenth-century cultural phenomena (material
and epistemological) that illustrate the increasing theatricality of the age. The
nineteenth-century understanding of the conscious and unconscious realms,
the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, and the popularity of mesmerism
and phrenology all contributed to, and were affected by, a particular form of
American discourse of theatrical selfhood. As the thesis winds itself out, it
becomes clear that the turbulent social transformations of the Jacksonian era,
the explosion of a market economy, and the decline of the Calvinist order
during the second quarter of the nineteenth century contributed to the
emergence of a particularly American way of representing and dealing with a
self loosened from Cartesian essences. A fluid social order, along with rapidly
expanding urban areas, problematized social relationships and contributed to

a general mistrust or uncertainty about one's peers, neighbors, or business

vii

relations. Conspiracy theories flourished in antebellum America and they
were buoyed up by the general discontent and anxiety brought about by the
nineteenth century's new ways of seeing and interpreting the self. In this way,
masking and disguising of the self-the famous confidence men of the mid-
nineteenth century--became important aspects of social and literary discourse
and, for my model of nineteenth-century American culture, contributed to
the theatrical selfhood of the period. My ideas, however, go beyond the bald-
faced hoaxing and deceit of the "confidence men and painted women"2 of the
nineteenth century and submerge themselves in the rhetorical patterns and
literary tropes that middle class Americans were using to represent their
selves to the world.

In order to tack forward to mid-century, I use W
WW (1798) in Chapter one as a
text that prefigures the mid-nineteenth century theatrical selfhood as it
appears in the literary discourse of Mowatt, Barnum, and Hawthorne.
Burroughs, a rogue and a criminal who writes his life in order to alter his
public image, engages in forms of the manipulation of the self that later
nineteenth-century writers will employ. Burroughs pays a heavy price for the
manipulation of self he engages in; his autobiography suggests that
immediate post-Revolutionary America was threatened and wary of
malleable selfhood. I am arguing, then, that by 1850, the kind of theatrical
selfhood that Burroughs exercises in his Memoirs has become normalized
and accepted in the epistemological trends of nineteenth-century America.

The chapters following the Burroughs essay concentrate on the
autobiographical/ fictional narratives of the three major figures of this study.

Through the production of their narratives and the display/stylization of

viii

their public selves, the figures of this study reveal the complexities of
theatrical selfhood in nineteenth-century America.

From her first acting performance on 13 June 1845 Anna Cora Mowatt
became a formidable figure in the theater world. She was an immediate
success in Boston and New York and even made an extended (also successful)
tour of England in 1847. Mowatt followed on the heels of popular
nineteenth-century actresses and performers such as Fanny Kemble, Fanny
Elssler, and Sarah Bernhardt--she was not the first actress to win the approval
of the public. Yet Mowatt appealed to a specific class of American theater-
goers and she made her appearance on the public stage at a time when the
middle classes, who were settling into a republic fueled by market capitalism,
were looking for entertaining, yet respectable, leisure activities. Chapter Two
uses Mowatt's AmghiographxbLanAmessnLEightleaanhejtage (1854)
as an example of a nineteenth-century woman who steps out onto the stage of
the public sphere and negotiates a sense of her private self in the face of the
demands and expectations of a culture that had very specific and limiting
ideas of what it meant to be a woman. Mowatt was an actress at a time in the
American experience when women occupying public roles were suspect and,
as I will demonstrate in a consideration of her autobiography, she spent a
great deal of time justifying her career to the public expectations of what it
meant to be a woman in nineteenth-century America. I am less concerned
with the history of Mowatt's acting career than I am with the rhetorical
mediations between herself and public expectations that she uses in her
autobiography. Despite the approval she won from audiences and critics
alike, Mowatt was still subject to the limiting role a woman could play in the
public sphere. Her autobiography, then, becomes a document that opens up a

dialogue between herself and the public sphere and rhetorically defends her

ix

public role as an actress. Through the presentation of herself in the
autobiography, Mowatt experiments with malleable (or what I will call)
theatrical selfhood. Negotiating herself into the public sphere, Mowatt uses
language to rhetorically manipulate a sense of her private self that will appear
before the public sphere.

P.T. Barnum, who perhaps understood public culture of the nineteenth
century better than any of his contemporaries, was an important and
formidable nineteenth-century figure who has been underrepresented in the
critical heritage of the American experience. Using Barnum as a central
figure, and paying close attention to the first edition of his autobiography, Ihe
Wm (1855), I uncover a nineteenth-century culture of
exhibition in Barnum's rhetorical theatricalization of self and Other.
Through the numerous re-writings of his autobiography, and through the
public presentation of "displays" such as the alleged 161-year old nursemaid
of George Washington, Joice Heth, and the Swedish Diva, Jenny Lind,
Barnum employed masking and disguising devices in order to present his
private self and the private selves of Others in the public realm. Barnum
participated in and helped to define a cultural sphere in which meaning was
wrapped up in seeing and interpretation. Nineteenth-century Americans
defined themselves and others according to the way they appeared in public,
and the dynamic nature of the public realm greatly opened up the possibilities
of individuals manipulating their private selves for public consumption.
Antebellum culture was thoroughly wrapped up in the public display of the
individual and Barnum, the greatest "show"man of the century, exploited the
mid-nineteenth century's penchant for the exhibition of self better than

anyone.

In Chapter Four, I use Hawthorne‘s voice as a comment on the nature of
malleable selfhood at mid-century. At first glance, Hawthorne does not
appear to fit into the equation I have set up: he was a retiring, almost obscure,
figure in his day and he was ostensibly averse to engaging in the techniques of
self-stylization and promotion that Mowatt and Barnum used. Whitman is
referred to throughout the essays, and the reader might wonder why I did not
chose to focus on him, or perhaps even someone such as Fanny Fern--
another American writer attuned to and actively participating in the
theatricalization of self at mid-century. But Hawthorne "works" here because
of his rather aloof, withdrawn, and self-conscious position in antebellum
America. Despite his outsider status in America, Hawthorne still employs
tropes and motifs of theatrical selfhood in the corpus of his fiction.
Moreover, as a writer of serious fiction, Hawthorne provides a perspective
into the nature of mid-century selfhood that Mowatt and Barnum were either
not interested or simply not capable of providing. Hawthorne was not an
actor or a showman, yet as he presented his self in his literary discourse, it
becomes clear that Hawthorne was as interested in performing and
manipulating his private self in the public sphere as were his contemporaries,
Mowatt and Barnum.

Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke out against the dangers of theatrical selfhood
and I use his ideas and career in the final chapter as a way to suggest how
prevalent the problem of self-stylization had become in nineteenth-century
America. Emerson, who was wary of the possibilities of a malleable self,
spent a great deal of time and effort trying to convince Americans that an
individual with integrity and fortitude sloughed off the temptations of self-
stylization in order to negotiate the private self into the public sphere. For

Emerson, the theatrical sense of selfhood that the other figures of this study

xi

experimented with was anathema to the integrity of the individual self. His
notion of radical individualism and self-reliance, along with his insistence on
nonconformity to the strictures of social institutions are representative of a
jeremiadic, contrary voice warning against the epistemological drift of the
American self from sincerity to malleability.

A note on method and scope: Contingent upon the interpreter's
justifications and decisions, the study of theatricality becomes as open-ended
and subjective as inquiries into the nature of American republicanism or
Romanticism. And while some interpretations are more thoughtful,
sophisticated, or clever, each interpretation is contingent upon the subjective
and ideological status of the scholarly mind/imagination as well as the
integrity and sophistication of the work. Studying theatricality,
republicanism or Romanticism can potentially lead to the syndrome of
cultural studies that Clifford Geertz calls painting bullseyes around holes in
the fence, or simply making things up and theorizing them into existence. It
is probably worth insisting that methodological self consciousness of the
inherent subjectivism of scholarship can go a long way in obviating the
potential problems built into cultural studies. From his insistence on the
subjectivity of scholarly work and emphasis on pragmatic scholarship, Geertz
may have pulled the rug from under our feet (a rug that people such as
William James and Kenneth Burke had been interested in removing), but his
influence on the methods and philosophy of research in the humanities has
opened up new ways (albeit with their own pitfalls) of thinking about
literature and culture. Ultimately, what saves historicism (or the scholarly
method of textualizing cultural forms into the contexts of the period in which
they were produced) and cultural studies from the ostensible methodological

aporia that subjectivity threatens to unravel is simply the realization of the

xii

invasion of subjectivity into the scholarly work. "Cultural analysis is (or
should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing
explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the
Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape" (Geertz 20).
Theatricality, then, is a theorizing construct that is no less useful for its
nebulousness; theory can/ should be used to mediate the epistemological,
sensory, and cultural differences between the past and the present, or to
negotiate levels of understanding that history and culture serve to obfuscate.
Historicism, Walter Benn Michaels has suggested, should be committed to a
continuity between the past and the present and, in this way, theory itself,
which has traditionally been perceived as a methodological tool that
transcends ideology, is collapsed into culture and serves as the bridge
between the past and the present ("The End of History"). Geertz talks about
the necessity of cultural theory to stay "rather closer to the ground than tends
to be the case in sciences more able to give themselves over to imaginative
abstraction. . . . The whole point to the semiotic approach to culture [or
reading culture as text and context]," he continues, "is . . . to aid us in gaining
access to the conceptual world in which our subjects live so that we can, in
some extended sense of the term, converse with the dead" (24).3 And it is
probably worth explaining that this study is more concerned with what
Stephen Greenblatt would call "cultural poetics" than it is with "literature."4
Each of the texts is examined as an expressive act entrenched in cultural
practices. What matters here is the imaginative interaction of language and
culture and the meaning(s) that are constructed through that interaction. Key

words here are "circulation, negotiation," and "exchange." Cultural texts
are produced (and interpreted) in context; indeed, "society's forms are

culture's substances" (Geertz 28).

xiii

Finally, the practice of choosing any number of authors/ individuals as
representative thinkers or models of an age is a suspect exercise.
Nonetheless, cultural and textual studies demand that these artificial, yet
potentially warranted, choices be made and employed. "Inevitably," explains
Stephen Greenblatt, "the resonance and centrality we find in our small group
of texts and their authors is our invention and the similar, cumulative
inventions of others. . . . So from the thousands, we seize upon a handful of
arresting figures who seem to contain within themselves much of what we
need, who both reward intense, individual attention and promise access to
larger cultural patterns" (Renaissanggfielfifiashiming 6).

Because of space and time constraints, I have limited the scope of my
study to a white, middle-class experience, but I do not mean to suggest that
other racial/ ethnic groups and social classes did not experiment with a
nineteenth-century theatrical sensibility. African-Americans, Irish
immigrants of the 18405 and, later, Jewish immigrants of the late-nineteenth
century, as well as lower- and upper-class Americans all stylized and exhibited
their public selves in different ways and for very different reasons. There is
another book to be written that pays closer attention to these other groups. I
have chosen to concentrate on a middle-class sense of theatrical selfhood
primarily because the emergence of a middle-class (a term which implies
social transition and transformation) culture in the mid-nineteenth century
lends itself to the dynamics of nineteenth-century theatrical selfhood as I am

defining it.

xiv

Notes

1See Forgie, for definitions and discussions of the post-heroic age in America.

2The phrase is taken from Halttunen' 5 WWW
Am ri Mi 1 -1 7.

3The final phrase, of course, has been made into the mantra of New
Historical thought by Stephen Greenblatt.
4See Greenblatt, "Towards a Poetics of Culture."

XV

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One: Theatrical Selfhood in the Context of Post-

 

Revolutionary and Antebellum America ........................... 1
Stephen Burroughs and the Problem of Theatrical Selfhood in
Post-Revolutionary America .................................. 5
Theatrical Selfliood in Antebellum America .................... 21

Chapter Two: Strategies of Opposition and Rhetorical Negotiations
in Anna Cora Mowatt's Autobiography of an Actress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58
Challenging and Confirming in the American
Cult of Domesticity ..................................... 65
The Performing Self in Autobiography of an Actress ............. 69
Disguising the Performing Self ............................... 81
Chapter Three: The Exhibition of the Theatrical Self and Other

in the Life and Writings of RT. Barnum .......................... 96

Re—Making the Autobiographical Self ......................... 99

Stylization of Other and an Antebellum Culture of Exhibition . . 113
Theatricality of Self and Other within a Culture of Sentiment . . . 137
Conclusion: The Vision Thing and the Nineteenth-Century

 

 

Culture of Exhibition .................................. 159
Chapter Four: Theatrical Selfhood and the Autobiographical Fiction
of Nathaniel Hawthorne ........................................ 170
Selfhood and Nineteenth- -Century Sentimental Culture ........ 175
Working at Home: Authorship in Jacksonian America ....... . 177
Authorship in America: The Importance of Being Seen ........ 179
Theatrical Selfhood in The Scarlet Letter ...................... 205
Selfhood and the Language of Sartorial Significations
in The Scarlet Letter ................................... 212
Chapter Five: From the Pulpit to the Platform: Emerson and the
Lamentation of Theatrical Selfhood .............................. 241
On the Stump: Emerson as a Public Figure .................... 248
Emerson and his Audiences: Confirming and Challenging ..... 255
Emerson and the (continuing) Problem of Antebellum
Theatrical Selfliood .................................. 261
Works Cited ..................................................... 267

xvi

Chapter One
Theatrical Selfhood in the Context of Post-Revolutionary

and Antebellum America

Despite its historical mistrust of the theater, a middle-class American
experience has been one of decided theatricality.1 Two recent scholarly works
by Jeffrey Richards and Jay Fliegelman have uncovered theatrical tropes and
modes of discourse in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. In
W Richards looks at metaphors of theatricality from the first
European settlements of North American to the end of the American
Revolution. In the discourses of early American performers from John
Winthrop to John Adams, Richards has illustrated the pervasiveness of a
theatrical sense of self and the way in which tropological theatricality formed
a group and, later, a national identity. For Richards, early Americans used
theatrical tropes in their oral and literary discourses as a way to order their
experience and expound the social, historical, and religious implications of
their settlements in the New World. Colonial Americans wrote themselves
into performing roles within the continuing American drama. Reacting
against their European experiences, and devoid of a legitimate theatre culture,
the colonists imagined themselves as actors on the stage of the m
mnndi—they became the liberators of the self from the strictures of Church
and State. "Whether they do so deliberately or not," argues Richards, "many
of those Americans frame their epoch-making actions . . . as upon a world
stage where individuals collectively act out roles in their rituals of
independence" (10). For Richards, theater and theatricality are indispensable
characteristics to the cohesiveness of American culture and he argues that

early American attempts to suppress the theater did nothing to preclude early

1

2
Americans from applying dramatic rhetoric in their attempts to create a stable

society.

111W Jay Fliegelman illustrates the theatricality of
Revolutionary American culture through the elocutionary revolution of the
late-eighteenth century. Reacting against the Enlightenment's formalized
and hierarchical use of language, the Revolutionary leaders set out to
discover and employ a natural language that would reveal the true
motivations of the speaker and mitigate, even preclude, the duplicitous
representation of self and motivations in verbal speech. In the
Revolutionary period, the "unadorned public man" (represented most clearly
in John Singleton Copley's portrait of Paul Revere), free from the
ostentations and chimeras of affected public life (which were rhetorically
associated with English politics), became the ideal. Actions, facial expressions,
and gestures became as important as words, as meaning was figured into the
body of the public speaker and the apparent "naturalness" of his performance.
This, of course, is an ideology pregnant with the possibility of co-option, and
the irony, not lost on Fliegelman, is that the republican search for a natural
form of verbal expression served to normalize a theatrical mode of discourse
and presentation of the self in Revolutionary America; finally, the
"unadorned public man" is as much of a chimera, a product of ideological
trappings, as any European public man.

Other recent scholme studies such as Peter Shaw's Americanfiatrimiand
thLBitnalLQLRemlutiQn and Ann Withington's W
Union have, in less textual and more historical and materialist terms,
explained the early and Revolutionary American experience as intensely
theatrical. Shaw argues that the American Revolution was "rehearsed" in

the 17605 through a series of homespun rituals that were modeled on English

3
precedents and adapted to the ideological needs of Revolutionary America.

Less concerned with performative selfhood and the theatricality of self that
Richards and Fliegelman see in early American discourse, Shaw, through his
discussions of the riots, demonstrations, festivals and personalities of the pre-
Revolutionary era, illustrates ways in which the colonists "set the stage" for
their revolt from England. Similarly, Withington uncovers a sense of the
theatricality of Revolutionary America in her discussion of the "moral
aesthetics" of the Revolutionary program. Using the Boston Tea Party as an
originary moment, Withington explains the social function and meaning of
public spectacles such as executions and funeral processions as ways for the
revolutionaries to cohere under a common cause and demarcate lines
between themselves and the Tories. Her discussion of Revolutionary
"theater," the mock and real funeral processions and executions, are all useful
readings on the theatrics of Revolutionary culture and suggest how the
spectacle of public justice used "histrionic techniques" to turn punitive
actions into dramatic episodes of moral/ political admonitions (71).

Scholars interested in the theatricality of the colonial and Revolutionary
period (Fliegelman and Richards, specifically) have focused on the
theatricality of selfhood in the face of a developing national identity. The
Puritans imagined themselves in histrionic roles where they were clearing a
space for the eventual sacred rejuvenation of the world. Similarly,
Revolutionary Americans saw themselves as performers acting out the last
great drama of world history as they ushered in a new republican age.2 In the
essays that follow I will argue that by 1850, the theatrical American
imagination had turned from a collective vision of a band of performers
acting out the rituals of national identity and hope toward a more

individualistic, self-centered notion of the self acting out a performance that

4
negotiates between the expectations of public culture and the necessities of

conscious and unconscious selfhood. American literary and historical
scholars of the nineteenth century have noticed this dynamic, but no one has
engaged in a sustained and focused discussion of an antebellum culture of
performance. For example, in W Karen
Haltenun constructs a dialectical argument implying that one form of
cultural expression or experience supplants another, arguing that by mid-
century,"[g]radually, the sentimental demand for perfect sincerity was losing
its tone of urgency, and being replaced by a new acceptance of the theatricality
of social relationships" (157). Robert Wiebe terminates Ihe_Qpen'mg_Qf
Wet; his study of post-Revolutionary American history and
culture, at 1850-a date where he observes the division of American society
along class lines becoming obvious and the beginning of a period more
concerned with material presentation of self than previous American
societies. Lois Banner, in Amgflganieam also sees a theatrical sensibility
developing by mid-century when she argues that changes in women's
fashion and ways of presenting themselves in the second quarter of the
nineteenth century contributed to the theatrical culture of the 18503.

The theatricality of American middle class life was a theatricality of the
self. Simply stated, the theatrical imagination of the mid-nineteenth century
works its way into the social and literary discourse of the period as a stylized
mode of self-presentation. Theatricality is about the perpetual
transformations of the self; it challenges notions of essential selfhood implied
in Cartesian logic and suggests the dynamic and unknowable construction of
the social subject. In this study, theatricality is a literary trope or a narrative
device that is employed by the authors of the texts and speaks for a particular
kind of performative selfhood of the period. Each of the authors of this study

5
is somehow aware that it is not necessarily what you say, but how you say it

(the performance of meaning) that is important; theatrical selfhood becomes
part of a rhetorical construction of self that enables the authors of this study to
negotiate, or stylistically arrange, private selves into the public sphere.
Fliegelman says as much in W but the performative
selfhood of mid-nineteenth-century America differs considerably from the
"unadorned man" of the late eighteenth century. It is the "adorned man"
and the "adorned woman" who steps onto the stage of mid-nineteenth
century culture. By the mid-nineteenth-century, Americans had caught on to
(and exploited) the problems involved with the valorization of the
"unadorned man" and the belief that the private self could be revealed in the

public realm.

Stephen Burroughs and the Problem of Theatrical Selfhood in Post-
Revolutionary America

It is curious that a body of scholarly work regarding an American culture of
performance after the Revolutionary period has not developed. The notion
of a theatrical, malleable self is contingent on the social and political effects of
the American Revolution--a series of historic events and intellectual
excursions which fundamentally altered the way Americans would think
about their selves in the public and private spheres. Consequently, inquiries
into American theatrical selves after the Revolution seem particularly ripe
for discussion and examination.

For Gordon Wood in The Rediealism gf the Ameriean Revglutjgn, the
American revolution was a social revolution that thoroughly revised the
individual's relationship to the State as well as augmented the individual's
autonomy vis a vis State control. The colonists' revolt from England effected

radical changes in the social fabric--the collapse of hierarchical distinctions

6
(and the consequential construction of new distinctions) and with the

democratization of government were a few of the social changes that opened
up possible fields of action for some white men. The weakening of the
traditional State and the colonial protest against monarchical despotism
created a certain amount of confusion though--as more individuals were
given a voice in government and as governing quickly became a science of
political organization, complexities arose that had no precedents. Men began
to step outside the auspices of State and monarchical control and perceive
themselves as freely-governing beings. The autonomous modern man acted
willfully, outside the demands of a Divine or a Monarch, and free from the
determinations of Fate. Modern man found himself with the power to affect
history rather than serve as the tool for the monarch or the State. With the
widespread notions that man's actions mattered came the plausibility of
causality and causal history (Wood "Conspiracy" 413). The epistemology of
causality allowed man to attribute effects to specific causes and place himself
in a central role in the workings of history.

In 1798, Stephen Burroughs published an account of his life, The
urn- . i' no..- ‘01'13. 0.11 o \‘i I'.'I' 1.: that,
through its rhetorical self-stylization, probes the limitations and the
possibilities of an American self freed from the constraints of the English
monarchy as well as looks forward to the experimentations with theatrical
selfhood evident in the texts of Mowatt, Barnum, and Hawthorne. The
malleable nature of the private self and the consequential dynamics of public
perception of self is true anywhere, for any culture, of course. Yet, for this
study the implications and the results of theatrical selfhood within a given
cultural milieu are the important issues. What was the effect of the

Revolution on the American self? And how did immediate post-

7
Revolutionary society handle the possibilities, the realities, of theatrical

selfhood? Burroughs' text will help us here. In the chapters that follow, the
question will be slightly altered: By 1850, what has happened to the problem
of theatrical selfhood? Has it fundamentally changed? Has it become more
dangerous, more nefarious? Or has the problem been altered and recast so
that theatrical selfhood has become an accepted manner of self presentation?
For Burroughs, as for Hawthorne, Mowatt, and Barnum, rhetorical
manipulation and creation of self is central to the narrative strategy.

The Memeirs of Stephen Burroughs becomes a text that exposes the
limitations of the autonomous self in the new republic. In addition, through
the manipulation of his public and private self, Burroughs demonstrates that,
in the post-Revolutionary period, the celebrated autonomous American self
is suspect in republican society. Through the public reactions against his
theatrical manipulation of self, Burroughs implicitly underscores the fear of
the self released from the strictures of social hierarchies and positions.
Burroughs' Memeirs shows us that the American Revolution deposed a
monarch and mixed up the social order, yet post-Revolutionary Americans
were wary of the free-floating self and anxious for it to find its rightful place
in the social order.

A picaresque narrative written in epistolary form that chronicles the life
and adventures of a late-eighteenth-century rogue, MeinLs becomes a
rhetorical attempt to justify the ways and means of the author to the
expectations of the public sphere. The narrative is both polemical and
anecdotal, incorporating discourses about the problems of post-Revolutionary
society with hosts of stories concerning Burroughs' travels through the young

republic.

8
Burroughs begins his memoirs with recollections of late adolescence; he is

a prankster who makes trouble at school and is thrown out of Dartmouth.
Ironically, he begins teaching school after his removal from Dartmouth and
when he is not in prison teaching remains his vocation even though he
accosts the reader with polemics concerning the uselessness of excessive book
learning. Burroughs continues his narrative with dazzling hard-luck stories:
he unwittingly falls in love with a married woman, he is falsely accused of
rape, and he meets inordinate trials in prison where he is serving a sentence
for passing counterfeit money. The rhetorical purpose of the anecdotes is to
align the reader with his sympathies and exonerate himself from the false
charges. Burroughs spends a better part of the narrative either in prison or
waiting to go on trial for another crime of which he has (to his judgment)
been falsely accused. Some of Burroughs' adventures are truly remarkable: he
burns down a jail in which he is an inmate, he organizes an unsuccessful
prison revolt, he is involved in a counterfeiting plot, he gets duped by a false
alchemist who convinces him that copper can be turned into gold, and he
suffers through miserable physical and emotional conditions.

By his twenty-ninth year, Burroughs has acquired a notorious reputation
from which he cannot free himself. Throughout the republic, his name
becomes associated with infamy and recklessness, and as the narrative
progresses, Burroughs increasingly finds himself the victim of his own bad
name. Consequently, much of his time is spent disguising and altering his
identity in order to pass as an ordinary citizen. Burroughs' sense of self is
radically at odds with the public persona he acquires, and the entire narrative
is spent trying to close the enormous gap between his private self and his
acquired public reputation. Burroughs employs tropes of the theajmm
mundi along with narrative devices of masking and disguising in his efforts

9
to absolve his notorious public character. Furthermore, narrative devices of

mistaken identities are used as vehicles for exploration into the malleable
nature of selfhood. Memeirs, then, becomes a rhetorical tool that Burroughs
uses to negotiate his private sense of self against his notorious public
reputation.

Daniel Williams' rhetorical reading of Burroughs' narrative is
informative and useful both for an understanding of Memeirs and as a way
to set the stage for the following essays. For Williams, Burroughs' text
suggests that self is based on perception and the context of perception. As a
result, the self of the public sphere is pregnant with transformative potential-
it is always open for manipulation and debate. "The perception of self was
based on external transaction of belief," remarks Williams, "and, as
Burroughs repeatedly illustrated, beliefs easily could be manipulated" ("In
Defense of Self" 97). For Williams, Burroughs' text is an early example of
subjectivity in American letters and a challenge to the notion of static
selfhood: "And in shaping his life into a literary presentation, he
demonstrated that good and bad were arbitrary, imprecise labels, a discovery
that led to a uniquely American relativism of self" ("In Defense of Self" 98).

Through his construction of a narrator named Stephen Burroughs,
Burroughs was able to manipulate the public perception of his self. He
engages in some crafty rhetorical and narrative devices in order to
accomplish his narrative motive of writing a self that counteracts the
notorious public reputation he has acquired. "Realizing that, in many ways,
reality is made up of what is mutually perceived," Burroughs has written his
life in order to effect a change in his public self—"he set out to alter the
perception of Stephen Burroughs by dramatizing his preferred view of self"
(Williams "In Defense of Self" 99). The act of writing and the creation of a

10
narrator transforms the notorious Stephen Burroughs into the wronged and

forsaken narrator of the narrative. Williams' reading of Memeies is
important because he has effectively separated Stephen Burroughs the writer
from Stephen Burroughs the narrator--a task I take for myself as I read the
narratives of Mowatt, Barnum, and Hawthorne in the following chapters.
Burroughs' text is embedded in rhetorical manipulations that thoroughly
confuse the public and private selves with the effect of undermining the
notoriousness of his public persona. The narrative is a performance; it is a
valiant attempt to re-make self, and an inquiry into the histrionics of
selfhood.

As a post-Revolutionary crime narrative, Memeirs represents immediate
post-Revolutionary notions of selfhood as well as looks forward to
nineteenth-century ontological trends. In "Rogues, Rascals and Scoundrels,"
Daniel Williams charts the three stages of crime literature in colonial and
immediate post-Revolutionary America, suggesting how literature reflects
perceptual changes of selfhood. The first stage is represented in Cotton
Mather's W (1699), a compendium of crimes and criminals who
are brought to justice by the "benevolent" arms of the State and who undergo
a compulsory conversion from their former "sinful" selves. Criminals of this
first stage of crime narratives repent of their crimes and, prior to execution,
submit to the will and beliefs of the authorities. Williams places the second
stage of crime narratives between the mid-eighteenth century and the
Revolution. The gradual waning of the Calvinist order and the increasing
importance of individualism (the valorization of the self), along with
augmenting economic opportunities in the marketplace, contributed heavily
to the development of this second stage (Williams "Rogues" 9-10). Crime

narratives of the second stage developed increasingly complex character

11
representations, were less concerned with confession, and more inclined to

attribute the waywardness of the criminal to social and economic
determinations. "The narratives [of the second stage] exhibited an
ambivalence towards criminals. They were ultimately executed, but not
before sympathy was aroused for them" (Williams "Rogues" 12). The third
stage of crime narratives (of which Burroughs' text is an example) developed
in the post-Revolutionary period. The Revolution institutionalized rebellion
against Church and State3 and, consequently, fundamentally challenged pre-
Revolutionary ontological patterns. Williams nicely describes the
epistemological sea-change of post-Revolutionary society and the beginnings
of the valorization of self in American thought:
Individualism, in short, was becoming more popular. Refusing to
accept the limitations placed upon them by either a Calvinist God or an
English King, Americans exhibited a far greater willingness to pursue
their own interests. . . . Self-determination, self-reliance and self-
initiative became socially celebrated ideals. Defiance of authority
became pervasive, almost institutionalized. ("Rogues" 12)
Prior to the American revolution, monarchical hierarchies subjected the
American self to mitigating forces. Philip Greven argues that evangelical
notions of the self before the Revolution were "preoccupied with ways to
abase, to deny, and to annihilate their own enduring sense of self-worth and
selfhood, convinced that only by destroying the self could they conform
absolutely and unquestioningly to the sovereign will of God" (13).4 The third
stage of American crime narratives, then, is a reaction to earlier notions of
American selfliood and is characterized by a roguish figure who generally
escapes execution at the hands of the State and explains his punishments as

unjust treatments. The rogue is inclined to represent himself as a martyr--

12
someone whose pursuit of his own individualism, his essential sense of self,

has been precluded by State strictures or misunderstood by the public.
Narratives written in the third stage represent fully-developed characters
who relish (or blame them on someone else) rather than repent their crimes.
Moreover, the criminals writing in this third stage are deeply committed to
malleable selfhood: the rogues freely change identities, masquerading,
imitating, and assimilating according to the particular situations in which
they find themselves.5

Memeire, which Jay Fliegelman reads as "a plea to the new nation to
embrace the new age of deception and invention," was widely popular during
the first few decades of the nineteenth century and new editions were still
being printed in the 18505 (W 245). The continuing
popularity of Burroughs' text suggests that he was raising issues important to
his nineteenth-century readers. Williams calls Burroughs' text a "huge
success" and an "early best-seller" that was published nearly thirty times in
fourteen cities ("Rogues" 14). The first volume of Memeirs was published in
1798, and a second volume followed in 1804. The third edition of the text
(1804) combined both volumes, and in 1811 a new edition was released with
an updated appendix and more notes. Three more editions were released in
the 18305, and the 18505 witnessed the publication of five more editions.
Furthermore, twelve editions of an abridged version of Memoirs. (both
volumes together run nearly 375 pages and the second volume gets tedious),
named Wm were
published between 1809 and 1818.6

Burroughs was read into the nineteenth century because he engaged his
readers in discourses of theatrical selfhood which were being taken up, for

instance, by writers such as Hawthorne, Mowatt, and Barnum. Burroughs‘s

13
readers, Williams suggests, "were engaged by his determination to create his

own criteria for identifying and evaluating the self, by his rejection of the
classical notion of universal truth and order, by his defiance of authority, and
simply, by his creative force of imagination. He did not attempt to deceive
readers by omitting his crimes, but to entertain them by demonstrating the
creativity of deception" ("In Defense of Self" 117).7 Williams suggests the
cultural work Burroughs accomplished up through mid-century as well as
associates his discourses with those that will be discussed in the following
chapters. Attracted to his individualism and intrigued by his exploration of
malleable selfhood, nineteenth-century readers read Burroughs in terms of
the literary discourses and epistemological trends of their time.

Burroughs uses the language of the theater to dramatize vitriolic
conspiracies directed toward the assassination of his character: He "enters the
stage of life" (3) and acknowledges the different "parts" he is forced to act (23).
Spurned by a woman, he melodramatically laments, "May I hide myself with
a mantle of darkness, and retire from the stage of action, into eternal
obscurity" (46). Released from a seemingly endless prison sentence, and
finding himself once more among friends, Burroughs joyously exclaims,
"Here was a theater upon which I had exhibited in such a manner, as to raise
the desponding hopes of my friends" (190). The entire narrative is written in
letter form and has apparently been requested by an unidentified friend
(another rhetorical device to catch the readers' sympathy); in an aside to this
man, Burroughs ruminated on the practical application of his tale by turning
his life into a public performance, "Therefore , sir, if you can gather anything
from my observations on those subjects which you have requested, either

profitable or amusing, I shall be highly gratified with my performance" (230).

14
There is a curious tension between the formation of a Lockean self and a

prototypical Emersonian notion of the irnperialized and self-created self
operating in Memgim Burroughs begins his narrative with a lesson in the
formation of a Lockean self: he represents himself as a prankster whose active
imagination and impatience with respectable pursuits set him on the path
toward public infamy. "My thirst for amusement," Burroughs almost boasts,
"was insatiable," and his "only dependence for that gratification" was in
making his superiors look ridiculous, "so as to raise the laugh at their
expense, and partake of the general diversion, which such a matter created"
(3). Despite reprimands—"the repeated application of this birch medicine"—
Burroughs reveals that his "pursuit of fun" was never quelled. In this way,
Burroughs confirms Philip Greven's formulation concerning selfhood and
childhood in early America:
Childhood was the matrix within which the sense of self, shaping
consciousness and convictions, was being formed, not only because
many parents set about to ensure the inculcation of particular modes of
behavior, values, and beliefs, but also because the accumulation of
personal experiences in the earliest years of life had an enduring
influence upon the development of the temperaments and religious
experiences of people in adulthood. (16)
Using devices that Mowatt and Barnum will employ in their autobiographies,
Burroughs uses his prefatory representations of self to demonstrate how his
life followed the patterns that were established as a child. For example,
Mowatt begins her narrative by suggesting that acting is an essential aspect of
her character, and, similarly, Barnum represents his childhood as a never-
ending pursuit of fun and jokes. Similarly, Hawthorne's letters to his mother

reveal his sense that authorship was his fate. All three spent the better part of

15
their lives attempting to realize the essential parts of their nature, be it

author, actress, or entertainer. Burroughs prefigures the valorization of the
self that Hawthorne, Mowatt, and Barnum were able to enjoy. A man ahead
of his times, Burroughs had sanctified his self at the expense of the authority
of Church and State. "Being true to the self, he implied, was more important
than bending the self to fit the exact expectations of society" (Williams "In
Defense of Self" 104). However, unlike his nineteenth-century followers,
Burroughs pays a heavy price for attempting to fulfill the needs of his
essential self. Indeed, as the narrative progresses, Burroughs' pursuit of
entertainment is severely quelled by the misunderstandings and tragedies
that seem to roll over him.

Burroughs uses narrative devices of masking and disguising in order to
illustrate the malleable nature of self-presentation. Following his removal
from Dartmouth and the failed love affair with a married woman, Burroughs
finds himself with little prospects for the future. Stealing ten of his father's
sermons, Burroughs leaves home intending to find a position as a minister:
"There is one thing, said contrivance, which you may do; and it will answer
your purpose;-preach! Preach?"8 Aware of radical differences between the life
he has lived and the role he purports to masquerade, Burroughs remarks,
"What a pretty fellow am I for a preacher! A pretty character mine, to tickle
the ears of a grave audience! Run away from my own home for being
connected in robbing a bee house, and for my attention to a married woman;
having been through scenes of tumult, during my career, since I have
exhibited on the active stage of life" (48). Traveling 150 miles south down the
Connecticut River and changing his name to Davis, Burroughs arrives in

Pelham where he masquerades as a minister for six months.

16
In Memms, sartorial significations become important devices in the

projection of a public self; Burroughs uses clothing to broach issues of
exchangeable selfhood. Aware of the importance of looking the part,
Burroughs laments his inability to acquire an outfit suggestive of a minister
(48). Appearing before his congregation for the first time, Burroughs remarks,
"I know my dress is against me, and will cause some speculation; but I cannot
help it . . . " (50). Burroughs understands the close connection between
appearance and belief, an issue that will be fully explained in the following
chapters. "Fortif[ying] my countenance with all my resolution," Burroughs
sets out to meet his parishioners and deliver his first sermon. "When I made
my appearance," Burroughs adds, "I found a stare of universal surprise at my
gay dress, which suited better the character of a beau than a clergyman" (50).
After successfully delivering his inaugural sermon, Burroughs manages to
nicely and quietly assimilate into the community: "I found myself soon able
to dress in a habit fitting my calling. I soon found, likewise, that my
endeavors to suit the people had not altogether failed" (53). Burroughs is
indeed a master of assimilation, molding himself into an unobtrusive
member of this foreign community: "I soon gained a pretty thorough
knowledge of the people whom I was amongst; and I endeavored to adapt my
conduct to their genius as far as I was capable" (53). "Suiting" himself up in
the proper garb is imperative to "suiting" the community. Following more
successful public orations, Burroughs actually begins to reconcile with his
newly acquired role as a minister, to see himself, that is, as a man of the cloth
and not simply an impostor: "I found it necessary to purchase me a horse,
saddle, and bridle, as well as to clothe myself anew entirely, with such apparel

as became a clergyman" (58).

17
Describing his maneuverings into the life of a charlatan, Burroughs

distances his self from the action by referring to himself in the second person:
Consider the language in the following passage:
. . . many difficulties must be surmounted, in order to enter into this
business [of masquerading as a minister]; but as this is the only kind
you can attend to, said I to myself, under present circumstances, you
can but be destitute of resource, if you make the trial and do not
succeed. (48)
Continuing, Burroughs begins to employ the language of advice manuals,
recommending clever and safe ways to be a charlatan in a young republic:
[I]n order to obviate the first difficulty, viz. of disagreeable reports
following you, it will be necessary to prevent, as much as possible, you
being known, where you offer yourself to preach; and in order to
prevent that you must change your name. This being done, you must
go some distance, where you are not personally known; and the
probability is, that you can continue in such business, till some
opportunity may offer for your entering into other employment. (48)
In his public role as a minister, Burroughs is constantly challenging static
notions of identity formation and public perceptions of the self. When he is
finally unveiled as an impostor, he is driven out of town and universally
condemned for the false role he has performed. Yet, in the narrative,
Burroughs is constantly reminding the reader that his masquerade was not as
artificial as it appears. Burroughs changes his name to Davis, his mother's
maiden name. Later in the narrative, when he finds it imperative to change
his name again, he continues to choose names associated with his family. For
instance, at one point he takes up the sir name of Eden, his father's first

name. This trick, of course, suggests that the altering of his public identity is

18
less dangerous than the general public assumes. Yet Burroughs, by recycling

consanguineous names, mitigates the ostensibly radical implications of name
changing.

Similarly, Burroughs challenges the idea of static, essential selfhood and
effectively turns the self into a dynamic, highly assimilable, rhetorical
construction. "All mankind are in a state of motion," Burroughs remarks,
"none remain inactive on this stage of probation; all are moving forward
with rapidity, and hastening to their final end" (56-57). For Burroughs, all
individuals are impostors, acting out public roles that are not necessarily
congruous with their private selves. Indeed, pushing the limitations of
republican democracy as far as it can go, Burroughs sees America as a place
where the individual has every right to be as duplicitous as 5/ he desires.9
Burroughs broaches questions that get at the problems of representation of
the public self--what are the implications of representing one's self as
"other"? Does it matter that Burroughs took on the preacher's role,
appropriating a clerical posture, even if he wasn't a "preacher"? Burroughs
contends that he performed his public role well; he has executed his duty
(until his charade is discovered, the town is happy with his performance) and
has "never, in one instance, taken advantage of that confidence which the
people of Pelham entertained towards me, to injure them and benefit myself"
(67). Why was he accused of being someone he wasn't, Burroughs is asking,
when obviously, for a time, he was indeed a preacher?

Burroughs concludes his masquerade as a minister with an intriguing
polemic on being an impostor. In a rhetorical effort to justify his actions,
Burroughs explains the determination of his fate: "Have I acted with
propriety as a man, or have I deviated from the path of rectitude? I have had
an unheard of, difficult, disagreeable part to act: I do not feel entirely satisfied

19
with myself in this business, and yet I do not know how I should have done

otherwise, and have made the matter better" (66). Contesting the public's
inclination to call him a charlatan, Burroughs says he has broken no laws,
even if he has "violated that principle of veracity which we implicitly pledge
ourselves towards each other, as a general thing in society" (67). Because the
public only "understand[5] the matter in gross," it does not realize the
extenuating circumstances that have driven Burroughs to his masquerade,
"[tJherefore, they concluded from this general view, the whole to be grounded
in wrong" (67). Burroughs contends that he has not engaged in his
masquerade for personal aggrandizement and, therefore, cannot rightfully be
called an impostor: "That I have aimed at nothing but a bare supply of the
necessaries of life, is a fact" (67).

Burroughs' notorious reputation follows him wherever he goes. As the
narrative progresses, the name of Stephen Burroughs gradually acquires
more infamy. His assertion of a malleable self is partly explained in his
efforts to clear his good name and release himself from the burden of being
"Stephen Burroughs." Chapter XIV, a section titled, "Becomes A Public
Character," records the accusations against his character that eventually land
him in jail for passing counterfeit money. Burroughs is sentenced to prison
for three years and the public nature of his trial, where his previous
masquerade as a minister has been used to convict him of counterfeiting, has
incited public opinion of his scandalous public persona: it "was a pretty
general opinion among people at this time," remarks Burroughs, "that I must
be conversant in every species of outrage which was going forward, and
consequently, when anything of that nature was known to be on foot, they
were very confident of my being interested in it" (100). Confined to a

Springfield jail, the public worries that it is "insufficient to hold" him and

20
sends him off to a more secure prison in Northampton. On the way to the

Northampton jail, "people thronged the roads to see this procession. When
we passed the people would inquire with eagerness, who was the minister,
being known more by that appellation than I was by my own name" (101).
Myths about Burroughs begin to circulate throughout the republic10 and on
his remove to the Castle (a prison in Boston) Burroughs continues to describe
himself as a notorious public figure: Stopping at a tavern on the way to the
prison, Burroughs (who was undoubtedly shackled) is immediately
recognized; he comments: "Some [people] were led here by an anxious desire
of seeing me perform some feats of dexterity in eluding my guard, concluding
that I should not remain with them longer than to arrive at this tavern.
Whether they expected I should evaporate in a flash of fire, or disappear in a
cloud of smoke; or whether they thought I should, Faustus-like, fix my
guards, like pillars of stone, immovable, to some spot, until I could leisurely
walk away, I do not know" (131).

Prefiguring Mowatt, Barnum, and Hawthorne, Burroughs becomes a late
eighteenth-century master of self promotion. As a result of the notorious
character he has acquired, Burroughs becomes aware of the close correlation
between seeing and knowing-a dynamic that Barnum was able to use for
personal aggrandizement by 1850. "For him, what people believed to be true
became true" (Williams "In Defense of Self" 107). Williams has nicely
summed up Burroughs' textual self-stylization:

The textual oppositions, impossible for readers to overlook, offer
evidence that Burroughs simultaneously was promoting the self and
illustrating the craft of self-promotion. Consequently, the perception of
self that he, as narrator, forced readers to consider was that there was

no self, at least no one self. There were only countless contextual

21
variations of self; in effect, each act of perception created a new self,

another ripple in the amorphous mass of identity. For Burroughs, life

became art ("In Defense of Self" 115).

The following essays are inquiries into the rhetorical stylization of
selfhood in the literary discourse of mid-nineteenth-century fiction and
autobiography. Like Burroughs, the subjects of the following chapters write
their lives and consequently create their selves. Engaging in the theatrical
presentation of self, Mowatt, Barnum, and Hawthorne negotiate the selves

they create with the demands and expectations of their reading public.

Theatrical Selfhood in Antebellum America

Since the theatrical imagination is inseparable from the cultural milieu-Q
that is, since literature is produced, and, hence, contingent upon the contexts
of culture—sketching out some larger cultural circumstances and phenomena
of antebellum America is imperative here. "Literary works," Richard
Brodhead has claimed, "do not produce their own occasions. They are always
produced within some particular set of relations in which literature's place is
at any moment socially determined" (W 66). Theatricality at
mid-century, then, is a product of a liberal, post—Calvinist America that was
rapidly expanding across space and time, providing wider angles of
opportunity for white men and anxiously defining itself as a democratic
nation.11 The theatrical imagination is informed by the changing contexts of
culture-changes brought about by technological, religious, and psychological
discoveries; it is socially determined, but also acts as its own agent in the
production of social and literary discourses. Like light being reflected and
refracted from the mirrors within a kaleidoscope, ideas circulate within the

contexts of culture. Through exposure to the aepects of a particular culture,

22
the responding imaginations grab onto and create the specific contexts of

culture; developments in fashion, psychoanalysis, image production (the
daguerreotype), and consumerism (the development of department stores,
etc.) of the mid-nineteenth century inform the ways individuals think about
the public and private selves and, for this study, the way in which the private
self acts on the public stage of the Wendi. Robert Wiebe has talked
about a "democratic surge" across space that fundamentally changed human
relationships and, more specifically, the way in which Americans thought
about their bodies, their souls, their futures and authority: "it infected
individuals everywhere with a heady feeling of command over their
destinies, a sense of marvelous potential in their own lives that they came to
project on to the nation as a whole" (143). Later, we will see how this
democratic surge and the American Liberal tradition worked its way into the
consciousness of nineteenth-century Americans, but for now, it is sufficient
to realize that the theatrical imagination of mid-century America was
informed by the promises and opportunities afforded most white men and
some white women in the new democratic culture.

Furthermore, the theatricality of American life at mid-century must be
understood m a culture of sentiment and sincerity. The middle-class
culture of sentiment and sincerity clashed with the increasing theatricality of
American life which arrived and evolved with a fair amount of ambivalence,
confusion, and skepticism. A general acceptance of the artificial and the
ostentatious had invaded the ranks of America's middle classes and posed a
threat to the sentimental culture of sincerity that is marked in texts such as
Stowe's Lanle_Iomjs_Cahin (1852) and aspects of material culture such as
sentimental dress and the ladies' magazines of the period. An aesthetics and

politics of illusion and delusion had become a normal part of middle-class life

23
and the following chapters will demonstrate the artificiality of sentimental

culture, suggesting that Americans had to "play" at being sentimental because
the cultural values that sentimental culture accepted and tried to enforce
actually worked to undermine the possibility of transparent selfhood and
promote an acceptance of malleable, theatrical self. In W
Nina Auerbach argues that theatricality invaded the Victorian (English)
imagination despite the fact that the theatrical self was anathema to the
Victorian/ humanist vision of human selfhood. The theatrical self was
dynamic and, hence, unknowable and non-essential; therefore, it posed a
serious threat to the dominant belief in an essential self that gradually moved
toward a Hegelian teleology of self fulfillment and evolution. That is to say
that, despite its prevalence, theatricality was not necessarily a way of thinking
about or presenting human selfhood that was accepted by nineteenth-century
middle class culture. The fact is that, in terms of the increasing acceptance of
the theatricality of the self in the literary discourse of the period, middle-class
Americans (like their English counterparts, as Auerbach argues) simply did
not know what hit them, nor did they necessarily believe in the very
theatricality of self that they celebrated in their fiction and material culture.
Indeed, as Auerbach observes, despite Victorian England's efforts to "finish"
the fictional self through narrative devices such as marriage and
conversions, static or essential selfhood remained elusive to Victorian writers
(and the same goes for their American counterparts). Like it or not, the
theatricalization of the self became a typical way of representing selfhood
throughout the period.

I am arguing that theatricality became a fact of American middle class
culture by mid-century and that it both threatened and formed a symbiotic

relationship with the culture of sentimentality.12 One of the arguments of

24
this study is that culture is conflict and that if consensus is formed at all, it is

the result of conflicting ways of seeing and experiencing the world which
come into contact with each other and form entirely new epistemological
realities. "Culture is neither autonomous nor an externally determined
field," remarks Richard Johnson, "but a site of social differences and
struggles" (39). Karen Halttunen reads the increased concern for fashion and
personal beauty as the decline of sentimental culture and the emergence of a
more theatrical culture, but it is not entirely clear, or plausible, that one form
of cultural sensibility triumphs and replaces another in the way Haltenun
suggests. Rather than presume, as some scholars have, that by 1850 a general
acceptance of theatricality had invaded middle class culture and consequently
undermined the cult of sentiment and sincerity, it seems more convincing to
talk about the theatricality of the period as a cultural phenomenon that
played itself out against a sentimental culture, and existed both in reaction to
and in a conjugant relationship with sentimental culture.

A consideration of the white, middle-class theatrical imagination at mid-
century ultimately demands a recognition of the importance and complexity
of what James Hoopes has called the "consciousness concept" that he sees
operating in the earlier part of the century. "Consciousness," Perry Miller
has remarked, "was a magic word in the early Republic" (25). By 1850, the
belief and wonder of the unconscious had saturated the American
imagination and made its way into the popular imagination. And it is worth
considering the importance, even the mystery, of consciousness to
nineteenth-century subjects because the theatrical imagination of the period
was intensely informed by the epistemological patterns of conscious and
unconscious thought. For Hoopes, the "consciousness concept" is the idea

that "the self is the creator and container of thought and that it therefore has

25
privileged, completely accurate knowledge of its own actions in thinking"

(32). In other words, the consciousness concept is nineteenth-century New
England transcendentalism writ large--it is part of the larger cultural
acceptance of social selves loosened from the strictures of the Puritan deity by
the second quarter of the nineteenth century. By 1850, the Puritan emphasis
on selflessness and its attempts to escape or purge the self had been
dramatically transformed. The self had been valorized and absolved of its dirt
and grime, and although there was still talk about the inevitable perfection of
American society, some nineteenth-century subjects agreed that American
society—not the individual—was corrupt and in need of repair. Consider the
following excerpt from Albert Brisbane's Sodal_Des_tin¥_of_Man (1840), a
utopian polemic in the vein of Fourier:
We assert that the evil, misery and injustice, now predominant on the
earth, have not their foundation in political or administrative errors,
in the defects of this or that institution, in the imperfection of human
nature, or in the depravity of the passions; but in the FALSE
ORGANISATION OF SOCIETY ALONE. We assert that the present
social mechanism is not ADAPTED to the nature of man and to his
passions; that its laws are in flagrant opposition to those which regulate
or govern their action; that it perverts, misdirects and develops them
subversively, and that the selfishness, oppression, fraud, injustice, and
crime, which mark the course of his societies, are attributable to that
artificial social misdirection and perversion, and not to say inborn
depravity in the human being himself. (quoted in Robert Levine 113-
114)
Now it was society itself that had become corrupt and if the domestic sphere

failed in its mission of forming a moral character, then the reform and

26
utopian movements promised to rejuvenate the individual self and, upon

treatment of the ostensible afflictions, return the individual to society where

5/ he would in turn positively influence the larger society. For example, as

David Rothman argues in Wad
W the emergence of the asylum in the

nineteenth century was developed under the notion that removing the
patient from the evil influence of the social order would heal him. Upon his
removal from the asylum, then, the patient would in turn perform his own
healing function by transforming the corrupt society from which he had
recently removed. The prevalence and popularity of the reform, utopian, and
revival movements of the 18305 and 18405, along with missionary societies
such as the New York Tract Society (founded in 1825), speak for a larger
cultural mistrust of American society and the need for the individual to be
saved from its influences.13 And if domesticity or reform still eluded the
individual's moral betterment, there was always the transcendental promise
of the individual saving his own soul by escaping the society's soiled talons
and boring into "self" in order to find religion, sanctuary, and the self's
original relation to the universe.

By the early-nineteenth century, James Hoopes argues, theologians were
speculating on the existence of a realm of experience within or beyond the
conscious or everyday world: "Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
New England theology offered fertile soil for growth of theories about the
inner life, especially the notion that personal identity rests in an emotionally
divided and partly unseen self within which human beings must reestablish
harmony if they are to be happy" (124). Nineteenth-century culture was wont
to bifurcate experience into mutually exclusive dichotomiesuthe separation

of male and female spheres is perhaps the most obvious example. Similarly,

27
some early nineteenth-century thinkers, as they speculated and experimented

with unconscious experience, gradually developed an artificial demarcation
between the conscious and the unconscious realm. Consciousness became
associated with the social world. In many ways, consciousness was the
Lockean slate onto which culture inscribed its values and epistemologies. In
relation to, yet quite opposed to the conscious realm, was this mysterious
arena called the unconscious. Of course the pre—Freudian unconscious was
not associated with a sphere of unfulfilled desires; rather, nineteenth century
subjects looked to the possibilities of the unconscious realm to help them
acquire a harmonious relationship with Nature and to direct their social
(conscious) selves in the direction of their essential beings.” The
unconscious, then, was associated with the Cartesian self of essences-it was
the arena of innate selfhood, a place where the individual could find a way to
"be at home in the universe" and an original relationship to Nature.15

The theatricality of nineteenth-century middle-class culture emerges
within the (artificial) interaction between the conscious (Lockean) and
unconscious (Cartesian) realms. In a Lockean universe, the self is writ upon
by the demands and vicissitudes of experience and is, consequently,
malleable--the conscious world is made up of physical externalities that are
open for manipulation and alteration. The Cartesian self is grounded in
essences that transcend culture; it acknowledges an order of human activity
beyond the boundaries of culture and is contingent on the uniqueness of the
individual. A theatrical sense of self, which strives for a middle ground
between the public and private spheres, develops somewhere between the
Cartesian self and the Lockean notion experience. Theatrical selfhood
develops within the tension between the public and private world and

attempts to negotiate between the individual sense of self and the

28
expectations of the public sphere. Theatrical selfhood emerges from the

results of exchanges between the demands of the public sphere and the
necessities (or whims) of the private individual.

Three cultural phenomena of the first half of the nineteenth century--
mesmerism, phrenology, and the invention of the daguerreotype--played
upon middle-class Americans' interest in the conscious and unconscious
realms. Ultimately, mesmerism, phrenology, and the daguerreotype became
cultural marvels that informed the theatrical sensibility of the 18505 by
providing middle-class Americans with new ways to think about their
private selves and project their public conceptions of self.

The history of mesmerism, and later phrenology, in American culture
speaks for the energetic, bombastic, and fervent spirit of the first half of the
nineteenth century. "No account of the antebellum scene is complete
without consideration of these often bizarre but highly influential pseudo
sciences," remarks David Reynolds. "They represented the rich mixtures of
the materialistic and the otherworldly that fed into the theory and practice of
American literature . . . " (170).

Originally conceived by the Viennese physician, Franz Anton Mesmer, in
1775, the healing process that would come to be known as mesmerism caught
on in Europe (Mesmer was most successful in Paris) as an aristocratic form of
entertainment and relaxation. Robert Fuller places Mesmer and his practices
somewhere between the mystical practices of the Church and the
overdetermined rationalization of human experience of the Enlightenment.
For Fuller, Mesmerism becomes a romantic way of seeing human experience
as it "uncovered the depth to human experience which defied reduction into
the mechanistic categories of Enlightenment rationality" (10). Similarly,

mesmerism, which explained the result of human ailments as cosmic

29
imbalances within the human constitution and attempted to balance the

equilibrium by correcting those imbalances through the use of natural forces,
served to de-mystify the Church's insistence on the supernatural healing
powers of the Divinity. In Europe, Fuller explains, mesmerism never moved
beyond a trend and "became just one more passing fad that entertained an
idle upper class" (14). It was Ben Franklin who, in 1784, reportedly had a hand
in debunking European mesmerism. Van Doren reports that Mesmer's
experiments with animal magnetism had become so popular in late
eighteenth-century France that a commission was formed to investigate its
methods and validity. Franklin, as a member of the committee, is credited
with exposing the fraud and deflating the inflammation of the popular mind
over the promise of mesmeric healing (713-17). The irony, of course, is that
shortly after mesmerism lost its credibility in France, it became all the rage in
America; exposed in France by an American, the lure of mesmerism soon
seduced the popular imagination of Americans. But in America, unlike in
Europe, mesmerism became a religious exercise and developed relative to a
declining Calvinist order and the consequential search for alternative healing
and new ways of thinking about the self in relation to the natural and cosmic
order.16

Charles Poysen brought the mesmeric phenomenon to America in 1836,
and shortly thereafter he was filling up lecture halls as mesmerism was
quickly becoming one of the nineteenth century's most popular forms of
public entertainment. By 1837, Fuller notes, mesmerism and animal
magnetism had become part of the social discourse of New England papers
and journals (70). Through the 18305 and 18405 mesmerists swept through the
States and the territories giving lectures and staging demonstrations.

American mesmerism was thoroughly entrenched in the popular

30
consciousness and was widely talked about and practiced in the parlor rooms,

public stages, and even the legislative offices of America. Henry Clay, Sam
Houston, and Daniel Webster were a few of the many politicians interested in
mesmerism (Fuller 70).

Not all nineteenth-century Americans were enamored with the
possibilities and promises mesmerism brought to the popular imagination.
In "Demonology" Ralph Waldo Emerson expresses his overriding suspicion
of the pseudosciences. "Mesmerism is a high life below stairs," he remarks,
"It is a wholly false view to couple these things in any manner with the
religious nature and sentiment, and a most dangerous superstition to raise
them to the lofty place of motives and sanctions" (30).

Emerson's contrary view was not shared by most of his contemporaries.
The mesmeric experience was adapted to an American, middle-class
experience and it highlights the prevalence of theatrical selfhood during this
period. For nineteenth-century, middle-class Americans, mesmerism became
associated with religion—they began to see the unconscious world mesmerism
uncovered as a spiritual realm of transcendental powers (Fuller 22).
"Mesmerism," Fuller explains, "received attention, not because it healed the
physical body, but for the more important reason that it effected a change in a
person's spiritual outlook on life" (71). In a cultural climate in which the self
was valorized, mesmerism became a way to explore that self and bridge the
gap between the conscious and unconscious realm of the individual that
culture and society had created.

The political and cultural events of American culture of the 18405
effectively carnivalized the culture and precluded mesmerism from
becoming anything more than a form of mass entertainment that had

pretensions toward religious/ transcendental quests.17 Loosened from the

31
authority of institutional science and aristocratic approval, American

mesmerism was quickly mainstreamed into the popular culture and became a
pseudoscience/ entertainment that was practiced in village halls across the
country. Consider Hawthorne's use of the mesmerizer, Westervelt, in Ihe
Blithedaflomance (1852). Westervelt (German for "Western world") has
essentially kidnapped the waif, Priscilla, and, dressing her up in ethereal
white gowns and mystifying shrouds, passes her off to unsuspecting
audiences as the famous "Veiled Lady."18

Despite its apparent carnivalization, mesmerism became a phenomenon
that mediated the apparent differences between the conscious and the
unconscious in the American popular mind. Most importantly, mesmerism
became an significant part of the theatrical imagination of the period.
Mesmerism suggested to nineteenth-century Americans the reality of an
inner, spiritual life and a way of expressing and exploring the individual's
dual nature. If there was an unconscious realm of essences that could be
uncovered, then it followed that the conscious sphere of reality was made up
of dynamic selves that were determined by culture and the individual. The
realization of this double consciousness caused them to consider the waking
state as one in which a particular social role was being performed. The
waking state became associated with histrionics and an artificial presentation
of the self--ultimately, the waking state became a realm where theatricality
could be played out.19

It is no wonder that each of the authors of this study thought seriously
about, practiced, and or/ exploited the American interest in mesmerism. In a
letter to Sophia dated 18 October 1841 (during his stay at Brook Farm),
Nathaniel warns his betrothed against seeing a mesmerist to cure her

headaches:

32
[M]y spirit is moved to talk to thee today about these magnetic miracles,

and to beseech thee to take no part in them. I am unwilling that a
power should be exercised on thee, of which we know neither the
origin nor consequence, and the phenomena of which seem rather
calculated to bewilder us, than to teach us any truths about the present
or future state of being. . . . Supposing that this power arises from the
transformation of one spirit into another, it seems to me that the
sacredness of an individual is violated by it, there would be an
intrusion into the holy of holies. (XV: 588)20
Barnum, the century's most effective bamboozler, ironically and
hilariously recounts an episode in SnnggleLandjn'omphs (1869) in which he
set out to expose what he thought to be a chimerical hoax on the American
public. Curiously, the scene resonates with Franklin's earlier debunking of
European mesmerism. Barnum's rival, Peale's Museum (taken over and
considerably commercialized by Charles' sons), had employed a mesmerizer
in its lecture hall which was drawing customers away from Barnum's
American Museum. In order to quell Peale's draw, Barnum fights a hoax
with another hoax when he engages a young woman to go on stage and
appear that she is being mesmerized by Barnum himself. She plays along, the
audience falls for the trick, and Barnum then proposes that if any man came
up on the stage and Barnum failed to mesmerize him in five minutes he
would give the spectator fifty dollars. It doesn't work, of course, and with two
minutes to go, Barnum gives up, goes back to the girl and tells the audience
that he is going to cut off her fingers to show she is so mesmerized she won't
feel pain (this is all staged, of course). The girl runs away, proving to the

audience she was never mesmerized to begin with, and suggesting the

33
theatrics in the Peale museum were, too, nothing more than a hoax

(Smiggleuadlrimaphs 133-34).

Mowatt actually practiced mesmerism and in her use and representation
of the process clearly demonstrates the gender-specific implications of the
mesmeric state. Barnum's insistence on engaging a man to be (not)
mesmerized says this much. To be mesmerized or to lose consciousness at
the hand and will of another--to put oneself under the control and direction
of another—was a practice suitably fit for the sphere of the nineteenth-century
woman and clearly at odds with the expected role of the middle-class man
and his endeavors in the burgeoning market economy. As the mesmeric
phenomenon illustrates, even the search for self in the nineteenth century
was a highly-gendered social activity. Mesmerism, a form of self-fulfillment
associated with the woman's sphere, involved a metaphysical dive inward.
Compare this with the male search for self, illustrated in most of the fiction as
a journeying outward to the virgin spaces of the sea or the wilderness, or (the
underside) a monomaniacal attempt to smash through the "pasteboard
mask" of reality. Yet, Mowatt found ways of using the mesmerized state to
forward her career and get beyond the constraints of women's subject position
in mid-nineteenth century society. The only professional actor of this study,
Mowatt uses mesmerism as a way to think about her function as an actress on
the public stage.

The phrenological phenomenon is a good example of the manner in which
nineteenth-century Americans devised ways to read their own bodies and the
bodies of others.21 Phrenology, which curiously resonates with the late-
twentieth century's infatuation with the possibilities of Prozac, was a
pseudoscience that was quickly tailored into an American model. Phrenology

became popular in America in the nineteenth century because it posed

34
alternatives for the individual against the corruption of antebellum society.

A phrenological reading of the skull analyzed the bumps on the head in order
to bring attention to and cultivate the concealed possibilities of the
individual. The brain was divided into separate sections, each of which acted
as the source for specific personality traits. Folds and fissures within the brain
housed these sections and were elevated or depressed according to their
prominence within the structure of the brain. The strengths and weaknesses
of the individual were read according to the bumps and cavities that appeared
over the specific areas; moreover, phrenological readings provided the
individual with a way to both assess and improve his or her condition. It was
a quintessentially American practice, setting out to help individuals realize
hidden potential and embark on the road to self-help. "The corollary [of
phrenological assumptions] was electrifying" notes Justin Kaplan. "[I]f you
found out what you were, you could then become what you wanted to be by
'depressing' faculties that were too prominent and 'elevating those that were
too small" (JALalLJflhitman 148).

A phrenological model of the brain revealed a decidedly fragmented way of
thinking about the individual. The various sections of the brain acted as
control centers where personality traits such as Firmness, Self-Esteem,
Combativeness and Conjugality existed in healthy or sparse doses. This
notion of the fragmentation of the brain, a nineteenth-century, pre-Freudian
assumption of psychological workings, suggested that the individual was
made up of various, pliable, and yielding elements which could be molded
according the will of the individual.

Phrenology was first introduced in America in the early 18205; by 1822, this
pseudoscience had its own society, the Central Phrenological Society, which

was supported by learned communities on the east coast and taken seriously

35
in prestigious journals such as the WM
WINES The movement augmented its authority in 1832 when one

of its founders, Johann Spurzheim, traveled to America, won over audiences
with his intelligence, wit, and charm, and then unexpectedly died six weeks
into his tour. Phrenology reached its height of popularity during the years
between 1838 and 1840 when George Combe traveled through the states on an
eighteen-month lecture tour consisting of 158 lectures, and nightly drawing
audiences of 300 to 500. Combe's proselytizing helped move the American
phrenological movement from a rather elite, esoteric phenomenon into a
stage of American popular culture in which phrenology was accepted and
practiced by the masses. The "democratization" of phrenology that John
Davies talks about in EhrenologLEaLand_S_dence was evidenced by the
thousands of "practical phrenologists" who combed the country during the
18305 and 18405. Itinerant, self-taught phrenologists began to practice their
trades and offer the American public a pragmatic use of the science of reading
bumps on the head: "[f]oot-loose young men, some educated but others not,
took off on the lecture trail, and during the 18305 and 405 there was probably
not a village in the nation that did not entertain at least one visit from an
itinerant practical phrenologist" (Davis 32). These practical phrenologists
exploited the nineteenth-century subject's thirst for the sensational, staging
lectures and performing exhibitions that drew up to 3000 listeners at some
Boston phrenological events.

In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter
Benjamin explains how historical and technological developments change
the sense perceptions (and I would add, the "self" perceptions) of social
subjects (222). The daguerreotype, invented in 1839 by Louis Jacques Mande

Daguerre and introduced in America the same year, thoroughly altered the

36
way Americans perceived their selves, their loved ones, and their nation.

Daguerreotyping became the most popular form of self-representation of the
mid-nineteenth century and it is interesting that daguerreotyping (which
validated the Lockean self) and mesmerism (which validated the Cartesian
self) would be popular at the same time: The daguerreotype represented the
external self that was open for interpretation by the public sphere while
mesmerism uncovered the "innate" self of the unconscious realm. Francis
Gourand (an agent of Daguerre's) arrived in America late in 1839 and had
success with his lectures and exhibits of the new daguerrreotyping machine.22
By 1846, daguerreotypists had set up studios in American towns across the
country and there were itinerant daguerreotypists who traveled across the
country in special wagons that served as makeshift studios. By 1850,
daguerreotyping had invaded the culture and was a regular topic of stories in
magazines; the daguerreoypist appeared as a fictional hero in Augustine
Duganne's WWHL the
first photographic magazine in the world, Ihe_12agneueian_Jomnal, was
published in 1850; Peter Buckley notes that an 1850 New York census
revealed 93 self-proclaimed daguerreotypists (507). Furthermore, by 1850
roughly 2000 daguerreotypists were open for business in the United States and
Richard Rudisill reports that by 1856, no less than 15 million dollars had been
paid for daguerreotypes in America (198). "If you want to know who makes

money in these Jeremiad times," exclaimed one contemporary, "it is the

beggars and the makuLdLlikeaessengLdaguerneojm" (quoted in

Trachtenberg 21, emphasis in original). In EhotograthoLthLmnerican
Scene Robert Taft notes that 3 million daguerreotypes were annually

produced from 1849 to 1853 (81).

37
The daguerreotype aided and created an arena for nineteenth-century

Americans in their theatrical pursuit and presentation of self. It is no
coincidence that by 1856, 95% of the daguerreotypes taken in America were
portraits of individuals, couples, or groups (Rudisill 198). The daguerreotype
provided the nineteenth-century subject with an entirely new and unusual
opportunity of self-creation. "The millions of surviving daguerreotypes,
mostly unidentified by maker or sitter," says Alan Trachtenberg, "show
people learning a new way of seeing themselves in the eyes of others, seeing
oneself as an image" (29). Prior to the daguerreotype, only the aristocracy
could enjoy creating and gazing at their own images. In its allowance of the
individual sitter to (largely) determine the manner in which 5/ he would be
represented, the daguerreotype was a more democratic art form than portrait
painting and (along with the low prices--a daguerreotype in the 18505 cost
about $2.50) provided a greater number of Americans with the opportunity to
possess images of their selves and loved ones. Emerson picked up on the
democratic aspects of the daguerreotype, commenting that "The artist stands
aside and lets you paint yourself, the true republican style of painting"
(quoted in Trachtenberg 29).23 The self-theatricality that the daguerreotype
afforded the sitter was more dramatic and powerful than that afforded to
sitters of portrait paintings. In the pre-daguerreotype age, the painter of
portraits was a stronger mediator between the image of self projected by the
sitter and the final image represented on the canvas. With daguerreotyping,
however, the representational influence of the painter was mitigated,
although not entirely lost. Consider the words of Nathaniel Parker Willis (the
popular New York columnist and brother of Sara Parton/ Fanny Fern) which

illustrate the built-in theatricality of the daguerreotyped image, the innate

38
power of the sitter as creator of his or her own image, and the society's latent

concern for the concealing and revealing of self:
Some of us know better than others how to put on the best look; some
are handsome only when talking, some only when the features are in
repose; some have most character in the full face, some in the profile. .
. . A portrait painter usually takes all those matters into account, and,
with his dozen or more long sittings, has time enough to make a
careful study of how the character is worked out in the physiognomy,
and to paint accordingly. But in daguerreotyping, the sitter has to
employ this knowledge and exercise this judgment for himself.
(quoted in Rudisill 211)
The daguerreotype was perceived as a medium that objectively mediated the
"truth" of the natural world. "The profession developed a rationale," argues
Alan Trachtenberg, "which held that the true daguerrean artist looked
through surfaces to depths, treated the exterior surface of persons as signs or
expressions of inner truths, of interior reality" (27).24 Still, the
daguerreotyping studio became a place where theatricality of the self
flourished. In IILYiSIhlLLighL Carol Schloss notes a list of "faking devices"
(the arrangement of draperies and backdrops and postures) that appeared in
the 23 October 1839 issue of the New York Post, all of which suggested ways
for the subject of a daguerreotype to stylize a presentation of self (34). Sitters
were given instructions on how to present themselves before the camera and,
thus, "were encouraged and cajoled to mill themselves, as it were, into a
desired expression—in short, a role and a mask which accord with one's self-
image" (Trachtenberg 26, emphasis in original). Consider, too, the figure

Walt Whitman cuts on the frontispiece of the 1855 edition of LeayeeoLGraes

39
--the robust and confident Walt (not Walter) Whitman standing aplomb and

akimbo, his shirt half-way unbuttonedubecomes a perfect example of a mode
of self-stylization (and an early example of self-marketing) of the period. The
daguerreotyped image makes the self-created portrait of Whitman look as if
he is among his natural elements, cutting a most natural pose. Gazing at the
picture, you would imagine him to continue sauntering down the street, on
his way to Brooklyn Ferry or down to the waterside to bathe with his friends.
And in the eight editions of Leayeeoffirass that followed the 1855 edition,
Whitman manipulated the image he presented to the public along with the
language within the covers of the book: With each new edition of Leaeeuf
Graes, Whitman proudly presents a new "Walt Whitman" "but none is the
'Me myself,‘ none the final, definitive Whitman" (Trachtenberg 67). The
magic of the daguerreotype was simply that it had the power to both change
and affect the way the individual could project him or her self to the world.
Self-stylization did not always work, though; some of the staging that
accompanied the sitter's mode of presenting the self lacked a serious attention
to detail. For instance, nineteenth-century subjects carried on the eighteenth-
century portrait sitters' (and artists') inclination to surround the subject with
articles that mirrored the sitter's identity—or at least the wishful identity--
women with guitars, men with books or tools, etc. were common scenes. Yet,
the images of men and women reading upside down books are not
uncommon and suggest the fact that daguerreotyping mitigated the role of
the artist's representation and placed more of the responsibility with the
sitter. This, of course, Was not always the case. For instance, many of the
images Matthew Brady captured of the Civil War—images that fundamentally
affected the way the nation felt about the gruesomeness of civil strife--were

deliberately staged by Brady. This, of course, does not make the images any

40
less powerful, but it does suggest the problems of representational art that

cropped up in the nineteenth century as a result of the proliferation of
daguerreotyped images.25
Daguerreotypes of the mid-nineteenth century were deliberately recorded.
The long exposure time required for the primitive machines tested the sitter's
patience, precluded surreptitious image-making, and further added to the
theatricality of the event. Excessive body movement of the sitter resulted in
poor, often eerie images that probably shocked early viewers of the
daguerreotypes by their ghastliness and their suggestion of mortality. Long
iron poles with two prongs into which the sitter immobilized his or her head
extended from the back of the sitters' chair and held the head in an
unnatural and seemingly uncomfortable position. Sitters were required to
dust their faces with white powder which gave their images a pallor and
suggested a mask of death. Oftentimes, the images would come out blurry,
almost ethereal, and if the image was clear, the exposure would sometimes
show the sitter with his or her eyes closed. As a new form of representational
art, the daguerreotypes challenged nineteenth-century perceptions as well as
traumatized its early models. Alan Trachtenberg has remarked that "the
daguerreotype seemed to possess its sitters" (14). Consider the following
passage from Godeyfisjadlesfimk of May 1849:
The different impressions made upon sitters is curious enough. The
most common is the illusion that the [camera] exercises a kind of
magnetic attraction, and many good ladies actually feel their eyes
"drawn" towards the lens while the operation is in progress! Others
perceive an impression as if a draft of cold air were blowing on their
faces, while a few were affected with a pricking sensation, while the

perspiration starts from every pore. A sense of suffocation is a common

41
feeling among persons of delicate nerves and lively fancies, who find it

next to impossible to sit still; and on leaving the chair, they catch their

breath and pant as if they had been in a vacuum. (quoted in Rudisill

209)

The author focuses on the female experience in front of the image-making
device and the language here is curiouSly sexual and highly gendered. The
camera becomes a site of pleasure; it has a "magnetic attraction," and some
ladies feel a "prickling sensation." Sometimes the camera creates such
excitement that the subject simply cannot "sit still." But the camera is not
always a pleasurable experience-«the writer notes that some suffer from a
"sense of suffocation" and "pant" and "catch their breath" after the
experience is finished.

By 1850, Copley's "unadorned man" was merely an historical image and
the "adorned" men and women who used the forms and methods of culture
to stylize their public personas were gradually being normalized in the
cultural sphere. Consider some of the changes in material culture that
various scholars have uncovered

A general change in the social acceptance of fashion as a worthy pursuit
further demonstrates the theatricality of the period. Fashion is part of the
semiotics of culture that speaks for larger cultural trends and values; indeed,
fashion studies becomes a context for cultural meaning, and an example of
material culture reflecting ideological trends. In Confidence_Men_and_£ainted
Women, Karen Halttunen adumbrates fashion trends from the turn of the
century to 1850 as a way to illustrate the epistemological and ideological
changes of the first half of the century.26 Halttunen and Lois Banner note the
increasing theatricality of women's fashion by mid-century. Parisian styles

began to invade the fashion conscious and "by the 18505 . . . the appearance

42
and behavior of women on New York City streets had changed" (Banner 73).

Once social observer wrote: "The wives and daughters of free-born Americans
seem to think they have a right to sport their silks and satins at what hour of
the day they please, whether in the boudoir, public sitting room, or on
Broadway. They look like tinseled butterflies born for show. If anyone needs
their services it is RT. Barnum" (quoted in Banner 73). Even the emergence
of fashion seasons which were prominently announced and displayed in the
store-front windows had the effect of turning the world and pursuit of
fashion into a drama. In Clefieoole Gunther Barth illustrates the
fragmentation of social selves in the nineteenth century:
The days of owning one working dress and one Sunday suit became
numbered as modern city life created more and more social pressures.
The promenade required different attire from the parlor; shopping
called for one dress, a social call another. The office and the theater
each made different demands on one's wardrobe. (142)
Furthermore, the increased importance of fashion turned clothing into
potential sartorial disguises that were donned (and bought) for many different
social occasions and surely illustrated the different culturally determined
social selves of the nineteenth-century subject.

Lois Banner demonstrates the increasing proliferation and acceptance of
hairdressers and cosmeticians in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Cosmetics had been used for centuries to cover blemishes and create a certain
sexual aura, but in a republican society in which simplicity and transparency
of self were politicized, the masking devices of cosmetics were suspect. The
use of cosmetics through the first half of the century was mostly associated

with prostitutes, but by 1850, "at least in the cities, such attitudes about

43
cosmetics were largely reversed" and middle class women took to painting

their faces (Banner 40—44).

As Gunter Barth and others have observed, the emergence of the first
department stores in the late 18405 also demonstrates a society flirting with
theatrical selves. A burgeoning urban culture, as well as industrial order,
and the changing consumer demands of middle-class women, created a need
for large retail dry goods outlets in which clothing could be purchased ready
to wear. Department stores, which did not really begin to effect the American
cityscape until the economy had recovered from the panic of 1857, began to
appear in Lower Manhattan in the late 18405, replacing smaller and more
specialized retail stores. In 1846 AT. Stewart's Marble Palace opened for
business at 34th and Fifth in (what is now) midtown Manhattan and
fundamentally changed the way Americans would purchase, think about, and
model sartorial fashion. In a condescending, perhaps jaundiced remark,
Barnum wrote to his friend Bayard Taylor on 22 July 1865: "AT. Stewart, who
owes his wealth to ladies, is erecting that large marble building in 5th Ave., at
an expense of $700,000" WM 139). America's first
department store filled an economic need for ready-made clothing but also
quickly became a public venue where theatricality of the self was exploited
and developed.27

The semiotics of the department store culture suggest the stylized
presentation of self that had become a regular part of mid nineteenth-century
middle-class culture. Department stores such as Stewart's became the early
theaters of consumer capitalism. The stores themselves, enormous,
imposing structures that would have caught the eye and interest of all of New
York, became spheres in which the theatricality of selfhood could be acted out

in everyday life. Lois Banner notes that by 1850, mannequins were being

44
displayed in department store windows and some stores hired women to

stand in the large plate-glass windows (effectively framing and staging
themselves) and slowly turn in circles as they displayed the latest fashions.
Once inside, the stores (like the theaters of the period) were designed so that
shoppers/ spectators had maximum opportunities to see and be seen. For
instance, the second of Stewart's four floors was used as a "Ladies' Parlor"—
dressing rooms made for promenading—where the woman could try on new
clothing and gaze at herself (and others) in full-length mirrors. Gunter Barth
explains "The displays in the large plate-glass windows added the diversion of
window-shopping to the pleasures of the promenade. Women came
downtown purposely to see and to be seen" (129).

Furthermore, the popularity of parlor theatricals as home entertainment
at mid-century suggests how histrionics and role playing invaded the middle-
class domestic sphere. In the increasing print culture of the period, guides for
performing parlor theatricals were readily available to consumers.28 "As they
built parlor stages, donned costumes and stage makeup, and learned to
perform amateur theatricals in their homes," explains Haltenun, "the
American middle classes openly embraced theatricality for its own sake . . .
[and] laughing harder than ever at the theatricality of their own lives" (174).
The popularity of parlor theatricals suggests one of the many ways in which
middle class culture was experimenting with histrionics. Indeed, the
invasion of the theater into the home is surely an example of the
theatricality of the period.

Finally, consider the example of funeral processions. Ann Withington
explains the funeral processions of the pre-Revolutionary as highly
politicized social events where lines were drawn between Tories and the

sympathizers of the colonial cause.29 During times of political trouble

45
(especially during the tensions over the Stamp and Townsend Acts) frugality

and simplicity of mourning rites and funeral processions became a sign of
one's political sympathies. But in ConfidencLMelLandfllntedflomen,
Karen Haltenun illustrates how the social function of funeral processions had
become adapted to a more theatrical period of the 18505. Mourning rites
became excessively ostentatious as they became public events that
demonstrated the wealth and position of the deceased and his survivors. For
Haltenun, the funeral processions of the period took on a dramatic air: "[tlhe
funeral procession is a dramatic movement involving many actors.
Although the performance may have its basis in an indispensable physical
act, social participation in it cannot help but produce significant ceremonial
overtones" (169). And, indeed, the drama of mid-nineteenth century funerals
was acted out by undertakers who acted as master of ceremonies, mourners
who became an audience witnessing a spectacle, and the corpse itself which
performed the lead in its last show on earth.

The sense of theatricality that mesmerism, the daguerreotype, and other
elements of material culture brought to America and the power it gave to
individuals in the self-stylized presentation of their selves suggest larger
cultural concerns about concealing and revealing, masking and disguising of
the self. Ralph Ellison has called America a "land of maskers and jokers":
"Americans began their revolt from the English fatherland when they
dumped the tea into the Boston Harbor, masked as Indians and the mobility
of society created in this limitless space had encouraged the use of the mask
for good and evil ever since . . . when American life is most American it is apt
to be most theatrical" (Shadmanich; 54). Mid nineteenth-century middle-
class culture invented and developed the penchant for role playing and

histrionics that Ellison has observed. The histrionics of American life at mid-

46
century, especially the cultural concern for masking and veiling of the self, is

a form of theatrics that uncovers some of the anxieties, promises, and
epistemological patterns of the period.

Not exceptional to the American experience, masks have been used as
narrative and cultural devices since at least the time when Satan dressed up
like the Serpent and tricked Eve into eating the Forbidden Fruit. Each culture
and each society uses masks in different ways which, when analyzed and
discussed, reveal particular dynamics and patterns of thinking. In the pre-
modern world masks were used in carnival atmospheres to suggest self-
transformation}?O But by the nineteenth century, according to Bakhtin in
Rabelaisandjlisjflorld, the social function of masks and disguises had been
fundamentally altered by the modern world and the age of revolution and
then industrialism. In the modern world masks became devices of deception
and secrecy: "Instead of working marvelous transformations," says Bakhtin,
the mask now "hides something, keeps a secret, deceives" (Rabelais 40).
Ironically, masks in the modern world become political tools that illustrate
the new notions of humans as self-governing and self-forming beings.
Masking becomes a way to talk about the public and private self in the
modern world where masks are used to constzuct the public and indulge the
private self, in addition to serving as a mystifying device that conceals rather
than reveals the self. In other words, masking becomes a way for the
individual to negotiate a sense of his or her private self into the expectations
and demands of the public sphere. In this way theatricality and the masking
of self becomes a way for an nation ambivalent about its purpose or confused
about its future (as America in the 18505 certainly was) to distance itself from
the cultural and political realities.

47
Consider Hawthorne's use of the mask as a narrative device in "My

Kinsman, Major Molineux," his tale of 1828 that broaches the ambiguities of
revolution in a democratic society. Robin Molineux, a country-bred
bumpkin, arrives into a "little metropolis of a New England colony" one
evening and becomes unwittingly embroiled in a chaotic and mean public
protest against the British monarchy (XI: 210). The leader of this "revolution"
is no George Washington--his "grotesque" features include a bulging
forehead, an irregularly curved nose, and "deep and shaggy" eyebrows (213).
As Robin unsuccessfully searches for his elusive kinsman he trudges down
crooked streets and is accosted by unprepossessing townspeople. The din of
the collective action resounds throughout the town, but Robin, an innocent,
is unaware of the gathering storm. Finally, as he sits on the steps of the local
church, the cacophonous and discordant procession--Hawthorne calls it a
"contagion"--comes "rolling" down the street led by the fiendish leader and
carrying along his kinsman in his "tar-and-feathery dignity" (230). Astride his
horse, the "double-faced fellow" (228) dons a "parti-colored" (220) mask that
shrouds his visage. Suggesting the lack of a unified voice or purpose to this
collective gathering and using images that resonate with the Boston Tea
Party, Hawthorne tells us that following the leader is a cast of "wild figures in
the Indian dress and many fantastic shapes without a model" (228). In this
collective action, the protesters veil their visages in order to enact their

radical performance.

The nineteenth century fear of conspiratorial plots against the republic,
while not specifically working itself into the literary discourse of this study,
nonetheless contributed to the theatricality of the mid-nineteenth century.
"Fifth column" theories, or conspiracy theories, have served Americans as

ways to explain unexplainable and potentially threatening social phenomena

48
(Davis, EearmLCmspiracy; Hofstadter). American history has demonstrated

that a fear of subversion tends to simplify cultural complexities and create
simplistic cultural bifurcations which ignore ambiguities. Masks and
disguises, then, become narrative devices and rhetorical ploys that suggest the
complexities that bifurcation ignores. As Gordon Wood argues in
"Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style," the art of disguise and public deception
became a common element of eighteenth century discourse (and, as I will
illustrate, nineteenth-century discourse, too) that reflected the complexity of
human experience introduced by the modern world.
Conspiracy theories become ways of explaining the unexplainable when
the State and the monarch had been considerably weakened. Gordon Wood
successfully integrates ideas of modernity with conspiracy theories:
The paranoid style, in other words, is a mode of causal attribution
based on particular assumptions about the nature of social reality and
the necessity of moral responsibility in human affairs. It presumes a
world of autonomous, freely acting individuals who are capable of
directly and deliberately bringing about events through their decisions
and actions and who thereby can be held morally responsible for what
happens. ("Conspiracy" 409)

In the modern period, masks and disguises become ways of illustrating

humankind's new relationship to government, God, and to "self."

In Conspirac¥_and_Romance, Robert Levine argues that conspiracy
theories are particular to the American experience because in the eighteenth
century republicanism was thought to have an ephemeral political and social
existence. It was feared that the openness and liberalism of republicanism
would give ready way to subversive tendencies and corruption of the

republican ideal.

49
The first lesson republican ideology taught was that the fate of a

republic was uncertain, for traditionally republics were short-lived,
subject to cyclical decline, and vulnerable to the plottings of internal
and external enemies. It was feared that the new American republic
would be especially vulnerable because its large geographical territory
and "republican mistrust of standing armies made foreign infiltration
all too tempting and easy. (Levine 10)
In a republic of free inquiry and popular sovereignty, fear of subversion was
particularly intense. And this is of course why the ideal of public virtue
became such an important concept in the political rhetoric of the eighteenth
century. "Republican ideology," Levine says, "taught, then that there was an
acute need for, and indeed a symbiotic relationship between private and
public virtue" (10). The fear of conspiracy continues throughout the political
and literary discourse of the nineteenth century, as evidenced in the anti-
Illurninati movement of the 17905, the anti-Masonry rhetoric of the 18205, the
anti-Catholicism fervor of the 18405, and the anti-slavery and anti-abolitionist
movements of the 18305 through the 18505.

Although the fear of conspiracy pre-dates democracy, it is clear that the fear
of conspiracy in America was spun in the weave of a democratic culture:
amid the mobility and ostensible equality of the new republic, many different
social classes and groups mingled with and "infiltrated" each other, creating a
social climate that was ripe for irnpostors. "The image of a vast subversive
force," David Brion Davis explains, "subtly appropriating and transforming
American institutions might well reflect anxiety over the problem of
preserving a consistent sense of national identity in the face of rapid social
change" (EeanoLConspicacx 1). A culture of Charlatans is the underside way
of explaining the equality of opportunity that a democratic culture of the post-

50
Revolutionary period provided for white males. But in addition to creating

opportunity, a dynamic and open social order also nourished a sense of
mistrust among American citizens. "In a nation in which every man is
supposed to be on the make," says Davis, "there is an overriding fear of being
taken in" (W xvi).

Masks and veils become metaphorical devices in the republic that raise
discourse of conspiracy theories and suggest the inherent theatricality of the
American self. In ConsoitacLand_Romance, Levine explains the post-
Revolutionary period as a "culture of masks." Behind the flagpole patriotism
marking the period was a real concern for all the dark aspects of American
culture:

Celebrations of America's republican virtue and burgeoning economy
masked concerns about the ingress of "European" corruption and
luxury; millennial assertions of the republic's future glory and
redemptive mission masked intimations of cyclical decline and
uneasiness over the slaughter of Indians; faith in the sacred bonds of
Union, as espoused in Clay's American System and embodied an
internal improvements, masked the sectional strains of the Missouri
Compromise and, later, the Nullification and tariff debates. (61)

In the countersubversive rhetoric of the post-Revolutionary period, objects
of mystification were particularly suspect. Consider the words of John
Robison in an anti-Illuminati tract of 1797:

Nothing is so dangerous as a mystic Association. The object
remaining a secret in the hands of the managers, the rest simply put a
ring in their own noses, by which they may be led about at pleasure;
and still panting after the secret, they are the better pleased the less they
see of their way. A mystical object enables the leader to shift his

51
ground as he pleases, and to accommodate himself to every current

fashion or prejudice. (quoted in Davis 40)

Robison's sentiments illustrate the ideas behind James Fenimore Cooper's
"masking" novels of the early nineteenth century-{hm (1821) and The
Braxo (1831). In both texts, Cooper uses masks and disguises to suggest the
disparity between the public and the private spheres and the overriding fear
of conspiracy in a republic. In both stories, misunderstood heroes—Harvey
Birch in Ihe_&p_y and Jacopo in Ihe_Br_a1Q--are forced to don masks and
disguises and consequently present a skewed version of their private selves
into the public sphere. Ihefioy, as it illustrates the dark side of the American
Revolution, is perhaps Cooper's most epistemologically subversive novel.
Later in his career, Cooper would have another try at a narrative of the
Revolution, but LioneL_Ljncoln (1825), a patriotic celebration of the
Revolutionary cause, is less successful than Ihefipy. The world of Ihefioy is
one in which masks and disguises and the manipulation of public selves
flourishes. The Revolution itself begins to look like a grand masquerade
where the players spend more time outwitting their opponents by using
mistaken identities than attempting to drive their enemies from territories
they claim as their own. In Cooper's American Revolution, even George
Washington (who appears in the novel as his historical self) rides around the
colonies in disguise and under the cover of night. Throughout M the
protagonist, Harvey Birch, is wrongly perceived by the public as a traitor to
the colonist's struggle against Britain. By the end of the novel, it is revealed
to the reader that, contrary to public opinion, Harvey Birch, rather than being
the notorious Tory spy the public thought him to be, has risked his life and
reputation for the colonial cause. It is a bittersweet ending, however, because

while Cooper lets the reader in on Birch's plight, Birch's own contemporaries

52
fail to understand that he has not been the traitor they expected him to be,

but, rather, one of the colonist's most stalwart supporters.

In IhLBcauo, a novel that combines socio-political commentary with
terrific Romantic devices, Cooper uses the ancient State of Venice to
comment on the political situation of the American republic in the second
quarter of the nineteenth century.31 The novel was begun while Cooper was
in Paris working with Lafayette during his efforts to defeat an aristocratic
contingency intent on establishing a constitutional monarchy in France.32
Still, the novel is as much about the contemporary American situation as it is
about France, or even ancient Venice. In W Cooper makes it very
clear that he sees any State organized around aristocratic principles as false
and dangerous. Looking back wistfully to the age of Jeffersonian
republicanism, Cooper was distressed by the apparent drift of the republic
from those values. The strong authorial voice of Maud reveals a mind
fearful of excessive aristocratic influence and of the increasing passivity of the
American citizenry. Venice is corrupt and decadent, the masses are docile,
the leaders are tyrannical and removed from the people, and an
overwhelming sense of lethargy pervades the State. In the world of Venice,
nothing is as it seems; it is a world of Carnival where evil passes for good and
the strong are wrongly persecuted for their ideals and vigor. Cooper's Venice
is a world of masks where public identities are constantly manipulated and
juxtaposed. The novel begins with a rush of Carnival imagery-"Hundreds
of pedestrians," were "pouring out of the narrow streets of Venice" to
participate in the State-sponsored masquerade (19). As the novel develops it
becomes clear that the State has an interest in encouraging the citizens to
participate in these public masquerades as they lend opportunities for the

leaders to operate their own machinations and influence the public opinion.

53
To the citizens of Venice the protagonist of the novel, Jacopo, the Bravo (or

the hired assassin) of the State, is a man to be feared and avoided. As the
novel progresses, Cooper reveals that Jacopo's public persona is at odds with
the real man; underneath the public image of a ruthless killer is the last good
man in Venice whose father, falsely accused of a crime of conscious, is
imprisoned by the State. Jacopo retains his position with the government in
order to, hopefully, free his father. Jacopo's plight, however, is even more
grim than Harvey Birch's--as "Agents of the police had been active in
preparing the public mind" (377), the State manages to foment public hatred
toward Jacopo and the novel concludes, eerily, with his beheading.

The great fear of the mask (and it is similar to the fear Reverend Hooper's
parishioners had of his own black mask in Hawthorne's "The Minister's
Black Veil") is the element of unknowing (mystification) it shrouds its wearer
with. And it is not the bearer of the mask, but the one attempting to peer
beneath the disguise who is struck with the most fear. Masks and veils are
empty significationuthey thwart the ability to "put a name to a face" and,
therefore, put into question the fundamental essence of the being behind the
disguise. All that masks reveal is our inability to know; they cast a shadow
over epistemology and demonstrate the fear that not knowing brings. Masks
are signs without significations and since language is humankind's way of
providing meaning, masks point to the prospect that meaning is illusive.
The mask can be anything from an actual veil to a letter "A" embroidered on
the breast or even a hothouse flower in the hair. Masks can also be associated
with membership in a secret organization (such as the Illuminati or the
Masons), indeed, the most disturbing disguises are the ones that are least
visible and least taken by the perceiver as a "self" disguise. For instance,

Hester's embroidered "A," because of her refusal to name the father of her

54
child, becomes a disguise for a part of her"self" she refuses to show in the

public arena. The very same Puritan community that was miffed by Hester's
"veil" was obviously less threatened by the armor worn by the Puritan militia
when it came time to parade the streets on Elections Day. These "disguises"
are State sanctioned and their sartorial signification corresponds with the
order of the hegemony. Rather than suggesting meaninglessness, these
"masks" demonstrate the overall purpose of the Puritan community and,
therefore, comfort, rather than, disturb the perceiver.

In the following essays I argue that the autobiographical rhetoric of
Barnum and Mowatt and the fictional characters of Hawthorne suggests that
public discourse at mid-century, rather than revealing the private life of the
speaker, is merely a rhetorical mask for the private self. Even more
threatening, however, is the suggestive possibility in the discourses of these
three authors (especially Hawthorne) that the masking and veiling of self is
in itself a charade and that selfhood is an elusive entity, contingent upon
cultural circumstances and devoid of any essential traits. As all of the texts
considered here demonstrate, by 1850 it was widely held that public
performances or the public self was merely a concealing device with which
the individual donned any number of social masks and disguises. The
transparent (male) self of the Revolutionary period (which gradually became
associated with the transparent female self of the Cult of Domesticity) had
itself become a chimera and mid-nineteenth century subjects imagined the

conscious self as culturally determined, dynamic, and potentially duplicitous.

55

Notes

1For an historical discussion of the slow start that the formal theater had in
America, see Silverman 59-71, 103-107, 235-245, 536-569.
2See Bercovitch 132-175.

3The question that plagued the minds of the Revolutionary leaders after 1783
was how to stop the rebellion. Prior to the Revolution, collective gatherings
and political convocations outside of State sanction were radical events. The
Revolution institutionalized these public affairs so after the Revolution,
when the people continued to express their discontent through collective
action, the problems of handling these outdoor activities becomes a balancing
act between the promises of a representative republic and the official need to
quell, or at least mitigate public dissent. See Wood's discussion, "The
Novelty of Constitutional Conventions," in MW
Republic (306-309).

4Greven explains three different models (Evangelicals, Moderates, and the

Genteel) of Protestant child rearing practices and religious experience in early
America.

5This third stage is not, of course, the final model of American crime
narratives. For discussions of crime narratives of the nineteenth century, see
Reynolds 169-80, 474-75.

6See Williams (118) for a nice summary of the publication history of
Memoirs.

7Regarding the nineteenth-century reception of Burroughs, Williams frames
an idea that sounds curiously similar to Neil Harris' twentieth-century
critical interpretations of RT. Barnum's "operational aesthetic" that I will
outline in Chapter Three of this study. See Harris, Chapter Three.

8This passage resonates with Hester's spirited advice to Dimmesdale during
their interview in the forest in Chapter Seventeen, "The Pastor and his
Parishioner." Exhorting Dimmesdale to flee New England, she asks, "Is the
world so narrow?" "Begin all anew," Hester admonishes, then tells
Dimmesdale: "Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die!
Give up this name of Arthur Dimmesdale, and make thyself another; and a
high one, such as thou canst wear without fear or shame" (I: 198).

9See Fliegelman's discussion of Burroughs in Prodigaliandjilgnms (245) for

more on Burroughs's vision of America.

10Jay Gatsby shares a certain mythical notoriousness with Burroughs. See,
especially, Chapter Three of W where Nick, attending one of
Gatsby's lavish parties, meets two women who exchange speculations on the
myths behind the Gatsby legend.

11See McCoy and Wiebe.

56

len the development of an American middle class see Ryan, Smith-
Rosenberg, Bledstein, and Blumin.

13Further, the notion of a corrupt society manifested itself in apocalyptic
rhetoric during the 18405 and 18505. For discussions of the catastrophic
themes in American discourse at the time see Somkin 34-54.

14Hoopes does not argue that some of these early nineteenth-century
thinkers were pre-Freudian or even developing a theory of the unconscious.
Rather, Hoopes explains they were developing the i_d_e_a_ of "unconscious
selfhood" or the notion that "the human self is not conscious of all of which
it composes" (100).

15For a more detailed discussion of Lockean and Cartesian notions of
selfhood in the nineteenth century see Hoopes 44-46. See also '
particularly Chapter Thirty-Five, "The Mast-Head," where Melville, that
consummate Cartesian diver, problematizes the leap into the Cartesian
vortex of essences. Perhaps more than any other author of the period,
Melville had his finger on the nineteenth-century cultural tensions between
the Lockean and Cartesian universes.

16In addition to the religious crisis, subjects of the second quarter of the
nineteenth century shared a general mistrust of medicine, which had yet to be
professionalized and was still practicing rather medieval healing techniques.
Wiebe talks about a common notion of the nineteenth century, prior to the
professionalization of medicine, that "every man was his own physician"
(160-164).

17On the carnivalization of antebellum culture see Reynolds, especially
Chapters Two and Four. On the "carnivalization," or democratization of
American politics, consider Andrew Jackson's Inauguration of 1828. See, too,
Robert Gunderson's account of the Log Cabin Campaign of 1840.

18For discussions on Hawthorne and mesmerism see Stoehr.

19Hoopes explains that by the second quarter of the nineteenth century many
Protestant theologians had accepted the notion of an unconscious realm and,
more importantly, the individual's need to mine its depths. Many
nineteenth-century clergymen found it necessary to argue for an unconscious
because it was the only way that they could continue to believe in a structure
of self that had innate characteristics determined by the divinity. "Many early
nineteenth century clergy therefore rejected the belief of both Edwards and
Locke that personal identity was constituted of consciousness alone. Only
unconscious selfhood could preserve a saving remnant of dependence on
God" (98).

20Hawthorne's entire letter is worth reading. It is not short, but in its length
and development of the argument against mesmerism it is a useful
document in the understanding of Hawthorne's mind and the implications
of mesmerism within his society. Of course, the views Hawthorne expressed

here are fully developed in Ihejlithedaleflomance, Chapter Twenty-Three,
"A Village-Hall."

57

21See Pfister for excellent discussions of how nineteenth-century Americans
used advice manuals and cultural practices such as phrenology in order to
read and assess their bodies.

22For a discussion of the history and social implications of daguerreotyping in
America, see Rudisill, especially Chapter Three, "Naturalization into
America"; Schloss, Chapter One, "Nathaniel Hawthorne and Daguerreotypy";
and Newhall, passim. Also, for more general discussions of the
daguerreotype and, later, the photograph in America see Culver.

23The equation of republicanism and self-stylization here will become a
leitmotif of the following essays: I have demonstrated how Stephen
Burroughs rhetorically used the idea of republican America to justify the
manipulation of his public character. The Barnum chapter is particularly
concerned with the tensions and problems of self-stylization in a young,
republican country.

24Still, some individuals such as Melville and Emerson were wary of the
belief that the daguerreotype had the power of mirroring the inner being
through the recording of externalities. See Schloss 36.

25The collision of traditional ways of seeing and the opportunities,
challenges, and threats that technology brings is discussed in Berger.
Americans have always struggled with coming to terms with representational
art. I am reminded of the story of George Washington milling around Peale's
museum and mistaking as real a picture Peale had painted of his sons when
he tipped his hat and wished the figures a good day. Peale was fond of
hoaxing in this manner: Learning the art of waxworks from Patience Wright
he constructed a wax image of himself and placed it in the museum one day.
When one of his friends entered the hall and gazed at the wax work, he called
to the ball of wax and was miffed that it did not respond. Proceeding through
another door, the friend was more than a little surprised to run into Peale
himself, who was observing all this from another room. See Sellers and
Fliegelman, QeclLinandependence (84-88) for a discussion of the waxworks
of Patience Wright.

26See, especially, Chapter 3 "Sentimental Culture and the Problem of
Fashion."

27For the history of the department store see Ferry and Homer.

28Some titles included: WW
Home Performances, and Binlesgue and Minsttel Acn'ng Charades.

29See Withington, Chapter 5, "Funerals and Processions."

30See Bakhtin, Bahelaisandflisflofld , especially Chapter One.

31Cooper's changing political sympathies have been discussed and debated in
McWilliams, Deker, and Bewley.

325ee Spiller 162-188.

Chapter Two
Strategies of Opposition and Rhetorical Negotiations in Anna Cora Mowatt's

Autobiography of an Actress

Soon after its publication by Ticknor, Reed, and Fields on 31 December
1853, James Fields sent Nathaniel Hawthorne1 a copy of Anna Cora Mowatt's
The Autobiography of an Actress; or Eight Years on the Stage. On 20 January
1854, Hawthorne addressed a letter to Fields in which he expressed his
admiration for Mowatt's text:

Ithank you for . . . Mrs. Mowatt's Autobiography, which seems to me
an admirable book. Of all things I delight in autobiographies; and I
hardly ever read one that interested me so much. She must be a
remarkable woman, and I cannot but lament my ill-fortune in never
having seen her, on the stage or elsewhere. (XVI: 166)
Hawthorne would never meet the author/ actress herself2 but he continues to
refer to Mowatt's autobiography in his letters. In a letter dated 13 November
1854, Hawthorne recommends the autobiography as one of the "half a dozen
good American books" he will send to an English friend,3 and comments,
"The 'Autobiography of an Actress' is very amusing, and admirably done.
One hardly knows whether to think her the simplest or the most artificial
creature in the world; though, after all, there can be no real doubt about it"
(XVII: 277). On 26 April 1855 Hawthorne would speak of two of her plays,

Armand and Fashion, as silly' enough to be pleasant reading" (XVII: 336).

 

Still, in a letter to Ticknor on 17 January 1856, Hawthorne is in the midst of
Mowatt's4 new work, Mimic Life; or, Before and Behind the Curtain (1855)
and again expresses his "wish [to be] acquainted with her" (XVII: 428). Mowatt

was more than an actress, she was also a writer, and moreover, her narratives

58

59
about stage life were evidently intriguing to Hawthorne's highly theatrical

sensibility.

Mowatt was a successful author of plays, shorts stories, novels, and essays.
Her drama, Eashion._oLLife_itLNeuL_Yonk (1845), a satire on New York's
fashionable middle class, was one of the most successful American plays of
the nineteenth century.5 "[I]n the matter of theme," remarks Daniel Havens
on Fashion, "Mowatt reveals what may be called a greater cultural maturity
than we have seen in any of the earlier playwrights" (135). She was also a
widely published novelist, short story writer, and essayist, with her work
appearing in W IheLadmLCdmaaaida Gddm
LadiesLBook, and GrahamlLMagazine. She wrote under her own name, as
well as pseudonyms, and she also acted as a ghost writer, penning such
domestic works as Housekeepingjyiadefiasy, We, and Book
ofjmhroideg; for the famous popular author, Mrs. Ellis.6

Besides the enduring popularity of Fashion, Anna Cora Mowatt is best
known for her work on the American stage. Mowatt was not the first nor the
most successful actress/ stage personality to win the public support of the
American public; she was preceded by the likes of Fanny Kemble, Fanny
Elssler, Charlotte Cushman, Ellen Terry, and Sarah Bernhardt. In an attempt
to put Hawthorne's Priscilla from Ihe_Blithedale_Romance into an historical
context, Brodhead comments on the emergence of "women acting" in
antebellum America:

What the Veiled Lady is most essentially is an image of woman as
public performer; and if we insisted on reading this image as
historically based, she could help us to the realization that the same
period already known to us as the decade of reform and of the

establishment of a more privatized and leisured model of middle-class

60
domesticity could also be described as the time of the emergence of

some women--specifically women in the entertainment sector-to an
exaggeratedly public life (W 51).
Lois Banner observes that "[a]lthough most major nineteenth-century writers
and composers were men, the most acclaimed stage performers, dancers, and
singers were women" (8). Mowatt, however, was one of the first American
actresses to enjoy the overwhelming acceptance of the American public. The
only other American woman to rival Mowatt's popularity in the first half of
the century was Cushman, who, incidentally, found fame by starring in
men's roles.7
Furthermore, Mowatt was the first actress to be lauded by the American
middle class. Until 1845, the public stage was still considered by most
respectable middle class Americans as an illicit sphere of deviance and
debauchery.8 As Bruce McConachie illustrates in MelodramatiLEormations,
from 1820 until the mid-18405 the American stage was primarily attended by
and written for males; respectable women did not become active theater-goers
until the emergence of moral melodrama in 1845 and even after that, the
theater was still a spurious entertainment.9 Similarly, Madame Minegerode,
in W (1924) argued that "ladies in general seldom attended
the theatre, except to see a Fanny Elssler, or an occasional opera, or some
visiting dramatic star" (150-56). In W
W Tyrone Power noted that it was uncommon to see women at
the theater in the 18405 (I: 62, 172, 211, 352; II: 172, 191) and Charles Dickens
expressed a similar observation in AmenicaLNotes (I: 192). Indeed,
throughout the 18205 and 18305 the only women to faithfully attend the
theater were the prostitutes who occupied the infamous "third tier" of most

theaters. Near the end of her autobiography, Mowatt makes a euphernistic

61
mention of this particular "problem" when she obliquely refers to the moral

"abuses" of the theaters: "I allude to the demoralizing effect of allowing any
portion of the theatre to be set aside for the reception of a class who do not

come to witness the play,‘ and closes the issue by stating, "But this is a
difficult topic for a woman to touch upon" (445).

Although the clergy had lost a great amount of its cultural power by the
second quarter of the nineteenth century,10 they were the ones most
responsible for the anti-theater rhetoric of the age. Actors and actresses were
suspected of leading immoral lives, but actresses, who challenged the
prescriptions of the cult of domesticity, had it particularly bad“: "With the
sole exception of prostitution, to which [the profession] were often compared"
argues Claudia Johnson, "no single profession was so loudly and frequently
condemned" (69). In 1840 Reverend Samuel Winchester argued that the
theater was a dangerous zone of illicit emotions: "The tendency of theatrical
amusements is to produce injurious excitement. The passions are inflamed,
the sympathies are excited, and a multitude of various emotions crowd upon
and often overwhelm the soul" (quoted in Johnson 70). Even as late at 1870,
clergymen were still railing against the theater. Reverend Talmadge, a cleric
in one of the largest churches in New York said that most people would
prefer to see their children "five feet under the ground of Greenwood" than
"in a month's association with actors" (quoted in Johnson 67). Even with the
popularity of moral melodrama, however, actresses were still suspect
characters to middle class Americans. These ideological assumptions (of
which Mowatt is acutely aware) help to explain her need to couch her career
in the rhetoric that she does.

"Real as her contribution to our drama was," says Arthur Quinn about

Mowatt, "her influence upon our theatre was probably even greater . . . she

62
proved triumphantly that an American gentlewoman could succeed in it

without the alteration of her own standard [middle class] life" (319). Indeed,
Anna Cora Mowatt removed the stigma of the theater from middle class
American life and finally made it safe for respectable and social aspirants to
enjoy American theater. In eight short years, she witnessed (and shaped) the
emergence of a mode of American drama that turned the tide of America's
moral aversion to the theater and firmly established theater life as a
fundamental aspect of middle class entertainment.12

In her AutobiogtaphLoLanMess (1853), written immediately after her
retirement from the stage and in order to fulfill a promise made to her
recently-deceased husband, James, Anna Cora Mowatt produced a text full of
the anecdotes and adventures of a middle class woman on the American (and
English) stage. Mowatt was born in 1819 and died in 1870; her life stretches
from the beginnings of the market-oriented economy and the cult of
domesticity to the abolitionist and feminist movements of antebellum
America, the Civil War and, finally, Reconstruction. Mowatt's life, and the
life she represents in her autobiography, is a cultural paradox: her career on
the public stage was a direct challenge to the values of the American middle
class and the socially prescribed definition of what it meant to be a middle
class woman. In her role as an actor and author, Mowatt became everything
that the middle class woman was not, nor was supposed to be: she operated
in the public sphere, she became a creator of culture, and she became the
economic provider for her husband. Yet, paradoxically, she was nationally
lauded by the American middle class. Mowatt's acting tours took her from
New York to New Orleans to London where she enjoyed overwhelming

public acclaim. She retired from the stage a legend, but, except for the

63
continuing popularity of Fashion, she was all but forgotten in the years just

prior to the American Civil War.

Anna Cora Mowatt was born the daughter of Samuel Ogden, a wealthy
patrician. Her mother's father was one of the signers of the Declaration of
Independence. Mowatt begins her story in France where her father had
moved the family in 1818. They returned to the States in 1826, settled in New
York, and Mowatt tells us about a precocious childhood filled with poetry,
frolic, and parlor performances. She eloped with James Mowatt (who was
more than twice her age) when she was fifteenna young age to be married
even in the nineteenth century. Given her rather patrician upbringing, the
marriage was especially shocking to family and friends and it was an early
sign of her characteristically independent will. The turning point in the text,
however, occurs a quarter of the way through when James, who is a lawyer
and a speculator, falls sick and it finds impossible to support Anna.

Mowatt's illness becomes the caison_d'_etre of Anna's eventual career on
the public stage when she embarks upon a career in order to support herself
and her invalid husband. Her career began in 1841 when she gave a series of
poetry readings that made her the first successful American "lady
elocutionist." Four years later she made her acting debut when she appeared
in a Boston production of the very popular drama, Ihe_La_dy_Qf_L;LQn. From
1845 to 1853 Mowatt toured throughout America and Great Britain and
quickly became one of the most popular and respected actresses of the
nineteenth century. Edgar Allan Poe, Mowatt's most faithful critic, raved:
"We have to speak of her acting only in terms of enthusiastic admiration—let
her trust proudly to her own grace of manner--her own sense of art—her own
rich and natural elocution" (quoted in Quinn 315). Mowatt retired from the

stage with much fanfare and public acclaim in 1853.

64
Mowatt's autobiography becomes a document that uncovers ideological

patterns of what it meant to be a woman in the public sphere in the rnid-
nineteenth century. 18,000 copies of the autobiography were printed and sold
at $1.25 apiece in seven printings between December 1853 and April 1854.13
Autobiography is an ideological act; to write is to place oneself within culture
and a specific historical situation. As Janet Varner Gunn argues:

Although the self already inhabits a world, its entry into the "perilous

domain of history" makes it impossible simply to assume an

unmediated relation to this world. At the same time, only because of

self's already inhabiting the space-time of its world can autobiography

take place. (9)
Autobiographical discourse uncovers perilous questions about the
possibilities of human selfhood. What is the relation of the autobiographer
to the text 5/ he produces? Does autobiography reveal an essential self that is
free from the ideological constraints of knowing and being? Or, does
autobiography illustrate the social construction of the individual, forming
and constraining him or her within specific ideological patterns of belief?
Furthermore, what kind of a role does gender play in the autobiographical
act? Accepting notions of the social construction of gender challenges any
universal or transcendental readings of female autobiography, but how, then,
does the construction of gender determine the style and vision of the
autobiographical self? In addition, how is autobiography used to conceal and
reveal the motivations and aspirations of the self that work against
ideologically determined gender roles?

In Autobiograoh¥_oj_an_Acttess Anna Cora Mowatt uses the

autobiographical act as a defense and a justification for her movement in the

public sphere. The theatrical selfhood that Mowatt experimented with on the

65
public stage spills from her acting performances and blurs into the "real"

Anna Cora Mowatt as represented in the autobiography. Aware of her
ideological position as a middle-class woman, Mowatt "plays" to her reader(s),
creating a sense of herself that both challenges and confirms her role as a mid-
nineteenth-century woman. Mowatt's autobiography sets up two primary
levels of discourse: on the first and most basic level, Mowatt confirms her
position as a middle class woman by writing all of the necessary aspects of
what it meant to be a woman in the mid-nineteenth century into her text.
The autobiographical self that she represents is thoroughly entrenched in
nineteenth century middle class values. However, Mowatt clearly is not the
embodiment of the nineteenth century's ideal woman: she operates in the
public sphere, she is the economic provider of her household and she is a
creator of culture.“ The second level of discourse, then, is the veiled Anna
Cora Mowatt—the author/ actress who has clearly gone beyond the limits of
the cult of domesticity, yet feels the ideological compulsion to mask her
public actions and motivations. Mowatt presents a particular challenge to
the prescribed limits of the cult of domesticity: as a poet, novelist, short story
writer for women's magazines, and, of course, actress, Mowatt pushed at the
boundaries of the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity, but still managed to
receive public acclaim. Mowatt was not just a stage actress--she staged her
entire life and her autobiography becomes Mowatt's own narrative
performance as she uses rhetorical devices to construct a self that can engage
in activities outside of the socially prescribed roles of nineteenth-century
womanhood without being labeled a deviant.
Challenging and Confirming in the American Cult of Domesticity

Mowatt was aware of what it meant to be a mid—nineteenth-century

woman and she writes her autobiography with gender roles and expectations

66
in mind. As Nancy Cott has explained in Ihe_B_onds_of_JALomanhood, the

social and economic turbulence of the post-Revolutionary period
fundamentally changed women's role in the family and in society. Earlier,
the home and the private farm served as the principal site of production.
Men and women were mutually dependent on one another to produce the
goods and perform the tasks that were necessary to survive and to make a
living. A developing industrial order and a market-oriented economy shifted
the modes of production from the home to the factory. As a result,
sometime during the decade of the 18305, the social roles of middle class men
and women were neatly dichotomized into two separate spheres. The gradual
shift from an agrarian and rural culture to a mechanized and urban society
carried the men from their homes and established cities and factories as the
primary sites of the production of goods. Men became associated with the
culture of industrialism--they built the bridges, lay the roads, and drew the
contracts of the new industrial order. Women were left at home, and as a
result, their sphere became associated with domestic life. During the 18305,
then, the cult of domesticity became the central standard for defining the
American middle class woman. "The canon of domesticity," explains Cott,
"expressed the dominance of what may be designated a middle-class ideal, a
cultural preference for domestic retirement and conjugal family intimacy
over both the 'vain' and fashionable sociability of the rich and the
promiscuous sociability of the poor" (92).

More than anything else, the cult of domesticity was associated with the
home. "If married women's occupations no longer predictably consisted of
domestic productive activities such as spinning, soap making, or brewing,
nevertheless," Cott argues, "they were identified with being_at_home" (44,
emphasis in original). Middle class Americans accepted a Lockean theory of

67
education-- women were assigned the task of promoting the virtues of the

republic by forming their children to be honest and respectable citizens who
would further the republican ideal. Americans of the 18305 through 18505
thought their society was fundamentally corrupt and worried about
decadence and threats to the republican order. William Lloyd Garrison's
philosophy of "Perfectionism" is a good example of a middle class belief in
the fundamental corruption of American society. In FeminismangLSuffrage,
Ellen DuBois says Garrison's "doctrine of perfectionism . . . identified the
sanctified individual conscience as the supreme moral standard, and corrupt
institutions, not people, as the source of sin" (33). After the 18305 in America,
the home became associated with a sanctuary from, and agent of
transformation for, the amoral and irreligious world of market capitalism.
The cult of domesticity, however, was not as monolithic as many scholars
have represented it. It was mostly confined to the middle class experience
and, as the life of Anna Cora Mowatt, as well as many other public and
private women in the nineteenth century evidenced, the socially prescribed
roles of domesticity were abundant with subversive opportunities. For
instance, the social role of womanhood to protect and forward the domestic
sphere into the more threatening world of market capitalism opened up the
opportunity for women to operate in the public arena. "[T]he celebration of
woman's special 'sphere' of domesticity," says David Brion Davis, "provided
a basis for asserting female hegemony over manners and morals"
(Antebellum_Ametican_Culture 73). For many, women's sphere was
responsible for working to change the social order at the same time it

nourished the moral necessities of the home. Consider the following excerpt

from W (1833):

68
But society, too, feels her influence, and owes to her, in great measure,

its balance and its tone. She may be here a corrective of what is wrong,
a moderator of what is unruly, restraint on what is indecorous. Her
presence may be a pledge against impropriety and excess, a check on
vice, and a protection to virtue. (quoted in Davis Antebelhim
Americaimmrre 75)
The experience of the middle class woman was not solely confined to the
domestic sphere, however. Indeed, the beginnings of the American feminist
movement (a decidedly middle class group of women) was visible during the
same years the American woman was initially being confined to the home.
In Femiru'sm_and_§ufftage, Ellen Dubois posits the early years of women's
political action within William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist movement, and
she points to the political experiences there which gave suffragists the
experience and the courage to later develop a feminist movement that would
demand a woman's right to own property, control wages, and, among other
things, vote. By the mid-nineteenth century, the American women's
movement was strong enough that it could call a meeting in Seneca Falls and
draft a declaration of women's rights and demands of equality.

Still, it is wrong to think of domesticity as a subversive dynamic, intent on
undermining the status quo of market capitalism. As Cott explains, "Yet the
canon of domesticity did not directly challenge the modern organization of
work and pursuit of wealth. Rather, it accommodated and promised to
temper them" (69). Domesticity was an antidote to the corruption of post-
Revolutionary society; it would transform and rejuvenate, but not necessarily
challenge the new economic order.

The 18305 witnessed the entrenchment of the cult of domesticity in

American life, but Nancy Cott also sees that decade as a "turning point in

69
women's economic participation, public activities, and social visibility" (6).

The new industrial order gave some women the opportunity to "get out of
the house" and participate in market activities--Cott notes that women led
and participated in some of the first industrial strikes in the United States (7).
Furthermore, the teaching profession began to open up to women during this
decade, providing some with another alternative to the domestic life. Also,
the reform movements of the '305 and '405 granted women opportunities to
engage in the public sphere. The reform movements and the cult of
domesticity shared a symbiotic relationship, each one providing a sanctuary
from the corrupt social order. Consequently, a middle class woman could
move freely between the domestic and reform spheres. Cott skillfully
discusses domesticity and nascent feminism and shows how the two social
dynamics were more integrated than mutually exclusive. Unwilling to term
domesticity a protofeminist movement (which would imply domesticity was
more subversive than she believes it was), Cott ends her monograph on the
note that women's domestic sphere in some ways looked forward to the later
feminist movements of the 18505:
Yet how much of what they learned in woman's sphere feminists
carried with them! Throughout the nineteenth century feminists saw
women's progress not in opposition to but at one with esteem for
home and family; their radical demand was to include a role in the

civil and public sphere among women's rights and prerogatives. (205)

The Performing Self in W

Mowatt found herself somewhere between the demands of domesticity and
the new opportunities afforded to certain women. She was most productive

as a writer during the years 1842 and 1845 and, of course, her acting career

70
began in 1845. Mowatt's opportunities to do the things she did in the public

sphere was a result of serendipitous social changes as much as they reflected
her ability as a writer and actor. By 1845, a tradition of "women writing" and
speaking in the public sphere had cleared a space for Mowatt's public life and
made her actions less radical than they might have been fifteen or twenty
years earlier.15
It is clear in the introduction to her autobiography that Mowatt's ideal
reader is a woman. Indeed, the preface of the narrative takes a decidedly
feminist tone
If one struggling sister in the great human family, while listening to
the history of my life, gain courage to meet and brave severest trials; if
she learn to look upon them as blessings in disguise: if she be
strengthened in the performance of "daily duties," however "hardly
paid;" [sic] if she be inspired with faith in the power imparted to a
strong will, whose end is good,-then I am amply rewarded for my
labor.
Although Mowatt was a woman of the world rather than the home--she
freely consorts with Henry Clay and William Ellery Channing, she gracefully
moves within Parisian society during a trip to the Continent-she is neither a
radical feminist nor even an overtly political "actor" in the public sphere.
Mowatt was not Fanny Fern, Francis Wright, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Whether Mowatt intended to subvert the dominant order or perform
cultural "work" in her performances and texts is not a question I am
concerned with here. Yet, Mowatt was aware of the political and ideological
implications of her life on the stage and the life she represents in her
autobiography; she was equally concerned with changing the public

consciousness (that is, justifying theater to the middle class and normalizing

71
the phenomenon of women working in the public sphere) as she was with

negotiating a space for herself somewhere between the limits of the cult of
true womanhood and her 1) life-long love for the stage and 2) the necessity of
her taking on a career to support her invalid (and bankrupt) husband.

In this way, Mowatt, begins to look very much like Catherine Beecher—that
other indomitable woman of the nineteenth century who advocated for
women's sphere to influence and change the market-oriented, irreligious
sphere of nineteenth-century men.16 Mowatt and Beecher were not
feminists in the grain of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who
argued against the essential differences between men and women and fought
to collapse the socially prescribed roles of the two genders into each other.17
Both Mowatt and Beecher, as members of the respectable elite, had a certain
vested interest in the continuing order of the republic, yet as creative,
inquisitive, and energetic women, their movements and accomplishments
could do nothing except challenge the dominant order. In Sensational
Designs Jane Tompkins (rightly) argues that the social function of domestic
fiction was to alter and transform (and transforming is different than
challenging) the social order, but Mowatt and Beecher (women not
necessarily working in the realm of domestic fiction) pose different problems
to the question of how they should write or act or teach.18 Mowatt's problem
in her autobiography, then, is to assert a sense of herself that allows her to do
the things she needs/ wants to do in the public sphere, while also paying
attention to the way in which her actions will be received by the public.

"Negotiating" is a good word to describe Mowatt's relationship between
her self and the assumptions of her culture concerning what it meant to be a
woman. Margo Culley has described American women's autobiography as

"that mirror glimpsed at, gazed into, and negotiated with in public" (10). In

72
her autobiography, Mowatt arranges and confers with public expectations and

then forms her public persona accordingly. Yet, despite the heed she pays to
her social role as a middle class woman, Mowatt is clearly someone going
against the grain of the ideological patterns of nineteenth century thought,
and her rhetorical posturing is clearly the result of her cognizance of larger
ideological assumptions about what it meant to be a woman, an actress, and a
wife in antebellum culture.

The autobiography, instead of being written "around" or "within" the
domestic sphere (requirements of sentimental fiction), uses Mowatt's artistic
accomplishments as the critical scenes and important circumstances of the
text. For example, when she returns home from a visit to Europe she
unashamedly passes over recollecting the "joyous greetings of kindred and
friends" in order to go into a detailed description of the rehearsals of her new
play, Mata (132). In addition to placing her name and her self in the public
domain, she also becomes the primary breadwinner of her family, challenges
the notion that women were unfit for intellectual pursuits by writing outside
of the sentimental tradition when possible, and argues polemically for the
legitimacy of theater at the close of her autobiography. From performing
parlor theater at home to playing before well-wishing crowds in Boston and
London, and from writing her first poem to penning numerous plays, novels
and short stories, Mowatt's story is "about" the life of a writer and an actress -
not a mother or a wife.

As Mary Kelley explains in W it was a
"revolutionary act" for a woman to be a "creator of culture"--"the boldest and
most presumptuous act of all on a female's part" (181). Mowatt was aware of
this and does all she can to mitigate her role as author and actor. Even as a

little girl, Mowatt seems to have been aware of the radicalism of women

73
writing as she describes the surreptitious maneuverings of a young and

imaginative poetess:
I used to sit for hours stringing doggerel together, and longing to show
it to somebody who would be sure to say that the verses were very
beautiful. I seldom had courage to exhibit these infantile productions,
but laid little plots to secure their being seen. Sometimes I would leave
a copy of verses on the floor in some of my brother' rooms, or on the
nursery mantelpiece, or write them on the walls in the garden, which
at one period were covered over with rhymes. (31)
In a wonderful anecdote that illustrates the power of nineteenth-century
patriarchal culture, Anna describes a plot to reveal her writing and the
consequences it elicits. One day, she purposefully leaves a "little 'poem'" in
her brother's room, and watching him pick it up and read it, she follows him
as he proceeds to take the piece to his father. Anna is highly agitated, not
knowing whether she will be chastised or praised, when she hears her brother
remark, "Just read this, papa; it is some of Anna's nonsense" (32). Her father
calls her in the room and Anna says she "sprang up to betake myself to
flight," but she could not get away in time and "entered the room like a
culprit who had been guilty of some heavier crime than that of murdering
English and perpetrating bad poetry." But questions of style and meter veil
deeper issues regarding the appropriateness or the ability of a young girl to
express emotions on paper. Anna's father pronounces judgment, declaring
the verses "quite pretty, for all that," but "not very good grammar." Still, he
caresses her in an act of encouragement and she leaves the room "inclined to
cry for joy," until her brother catches her, takes the verses from her hands and
begins to point "out the flagrant mistakes in metre, in grammar, in sense."

The whole incident filled Anna with "conflicting emotions" of "delight,"

74
"vexation," and "shame," and she concludes the anecdote by declaring, "For a

long period after that I kept every thing I wrote carefully locked up, and made
a bonfire when my store accumulated beyond limits" (32). As readers, we
might attribute the young girl's reactions to childish self-consciousness;
however, as the autobiography progresses Mowatt continues to pick and
choose how she will represent her career as a creator of culture.

Unlike the Romantic Men of Letters of the nineteenth century who
celebrate the individualism and self-governing autonomy that is associated
with the creative act and position their "selves" at the starting point of the
creative process,19 Mowatt feels the ideological pressure that the nineteenth-
century woman was not to initiate strategies and courses of action. Mowatt's
narrative is couched in qualifications: autobiography, the ultimate assertion
of the self, is mitigated (and, oftentimes, rhetorically disguised) with the extra-
literary intrusions of letters and poems written by family and friends in an
effort to legitimize her culturally-determined position as a middle-class,
nineteenth-century woman and to deflate the autobiographical self associated
with male writers. Yet, by deflating her autobiographical self, Mowatt has
devised a strategy in the Autobiography to deflect the criticism she might
receive for being too bold in her pursuits. On one level, Mowatt represents
herself and her career as the embodiment of male authority. Her creative life
is inspired by others; she goes out of her way to show the reader that her life
as an author and actress was not part of her own grand design toward self-
fulfilhnent and fame. As a nineteenth-century middle class woman, she
cannot initiate her own career or artistic endeavors for fear of being labeled a
conniving and calculating woman, more concerned with her own self than
the welfare of her family and the private sphere she is trusted with guarding.

Instead, Mowatt masks her creative impulses, representing herself as an

75
empty vessel who is filled up with the encouragement of family and friends

to write and to act. Mowatt represents herself as a passive agent in the process
of her artistic career. Mowatt's artistic accomplishments occupy center stage
in her narrative, but in order to do this and still work within the ideology of
the cult of domesticity, she finds it necessary to manipulate rhetorically the
way the reader perceives the development of her career. Most importantly,
she explains her artistic impulses as the effects of encouragement from
friends and family.

Consider the manner in which Mowatt has set up her relationship with
her husband, James Mowatt. As a bachelor approaching middle age, Mowatt
meets Anna's older sister, Charlotte, at Rockaway, and thinking her unwed,
openly declares his affection. Charlotte demurs, explaining she has a
husband, but encourages Mowatt to visit her father's house, explaining she
has "plenty of young sisters at home and one of them very much resembles
me" (41). Of course Charlotte was not thinking of Anna, who was only
thirteen, yet Mowatt goes for a visit, does not find the other sisters favorable,
but catches a glimpse of the thirteen-year old Anna and immediately takes it
into his head that he will marry her. The courtship that follows is an
astonishing story that illustrates a society in a transitory state between
arranged marriages and those motivated by romantic love.20 But even
more than that, the courtship of James Mowatt and Anna Cora Ogden
becomes a cogent example of the power of nineteenth-century patriarchy.

The first time James sees Anna she is rushing through the drawing room
on her way to school. He asks her sister to call Anna back, but she calls out, "I
don't care for Mr. Mowatt," (which a skeptical twentieth-century reader can
only take to mean that she really does care for Mr. Mowatt, or is at least

strangely fascinated with him) and several minutes later, thinking he has

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departed, she steps out of the front door only to be confronted by James

himself: "Mr. Mowatt was standing at the foot of the street door steps, and
placed himself in front of me with extended arms. There was no retreat, and
he kept me prisoner for some time" (43). This is hardly the language of star-
crossed lovers and Anna proceeds to explain the relationship in terms of
confinement and embodiment. Later in their relationship James tells Anna
that shortly after their first encounter on the front steps, he ran into an old
friend and declared, "I feel as though I should never marry unless I marry
that child," using a few of Moore's sentimental lines to convey, and stylize,
his emotions.21 And it was at that moment, Anna tells us, that James
"conceived the project of educating me to suit his own views—of gaining my
affections, and, the instant I was old enough to be considered marriageable, of
taking me to his own home—his child-wife" (44). Anna casts herself into the
role of the reluctant lover, and James as the indomitable pursuer. When
James proposes to her in her fourteenth year, she sits down to write a letter
explaining to the persistent lover that she is too young to marry and would
rather be his friend, but upon reading the letter, James "merely laughed at
what he considered girlish shyness" and shortly before her fifteenth birthday,
the "'No'" inscribed in her initial response to his hand in marriage "was
forgotten, and a 'Yes' had taken its place" (47). The appeal to Anna's father is
made, but he thwarts the plans by asking the couple to wait until Anna
turned 17, but, Anna writes, "This answer did not satisfy a lover whose
principal object was to direct the whole education of the girl he married" (47).
Eventually, James' persistence convinces Anna to elope and it is important
that they surreptitiously leave on the night before Anna and her sisters were

to give a parlor theatrical of Voltaire's "Alzire" for their family. The play, of

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course, had to be given up and Anna exchanges her stage costume for the

bridal wardrobe and becomes a child-bride of 15.

Mowatt uses this aspect of their relationship in order to confirm her place
within the cult of true womanhood at the same time she is pushing at its
boundaries, and her rhetorical use of oppositional strategies here is quite
cagey. Furthermore, Mowatt plays against the function of marriage in
Victorian society and fiction. In Frieatelheatricals, Nina Auerbach shows
how marriage was used as a fictional device to cease the development of the
self. Victorians worried about the possibilities of a theatrical or non-essential
self used marriage as a way to freeze its transformations. "In fiction, marriage
. . . terminates the process of conversion. For men and women alike, the
discovery of the right mate not only neutralizes the dangerously detonating
self by splitting it in two; it sets an evolutionary seal on that self's theatrical
explosiveness" (62). For Mowatt, however, marriage is a lever that springs
her into a world of books and poetry and theatrics; marriage provides a space
for her theatrical self to proceed rather than regress into its essence.

Furthermore, Mowatt represents herself as an empty vessel to be
objectified and filled up with the ideology of her husband, yet she uses these
instances when others give her career advice to empower herself and to
accomplish her career on the stage and in the literary world; her husband has
always encouraged her intellectual pursuits and it is, finally, his sickness and
inability to support the household that opens up the opportunity for Anna to
work in the public sphere. And it is clear that for Mowatt, as a nineteenth-
century middle-class woman who finds herself in the position of having to
explain and justify her career, this device of representing herself as someone
who has been formed and molded by her husband becomes her way of

justifying her position to the expectations of the respectable society.

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Mowatt peppers her account of herself with the voices and admonitions of

other people. For instance, in Chapter I of Autobiography Mowatt narrates
her family's voyage from France to America when she was a young girl.
Inserted into her account is a description of the shipwreck the family
survives, everyone, that is, except one of the younger brothers. But,
unwilling or unable to provide the account of the loss, Anna includes a long
section (7 pages) written by her brother, Charles, describing the death of the
young boy. Other narrative intrusions occur when Anna relates her
mesmeric experiencenshe uses a long letter from a friend (9 pages) to describe
her somnambulistic state and her actions while under the veil of the
mesmerist (170-79)--and she includes poems and excerpts of news articles
written both to honor and condemn her.22

As a young woman negotiating a space for herself in the public sphere,
Mowatt continues to throw her career into the knowing hands of males.
Chapter X begins with Mowatt telling us that, under the pseudonym of Helen
Berkely (a typical concealing/ veiling strategy for women writers of the rnid-
nineteenth century23), she had been writing "a series of lively articles," but,
under her own name, she had been writing and publishing verse.24 Just
when she was "half determined" to begin writing a "tale of some length," a
friend informs her that the New World newspaper has offered one hundred
dollars to the best original novel with the title, Fortune_Hunter, and set in
New York. Unwilling to show the act of writing emitting from her own will,
Mowatt uses the voice of another to encourage the effort: "Why do you not
try what you can do?" the friend says, "Write a story in your Mrs. Berkley
style . . . Ten to one your novel will be the one accepted" (185). She sets to
work and the story, Fortune_l:lunter_, wins first prize and is accepted for
publication.25

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Similarly, Chapter XI begins with the following suggestions from E. S--

(her literary agent, mesmerist, and confidante, Epes Sargent):
Why do you not write a play? You have more decided talent for the
stage than for any thing [sic] else. If we can get it accepted by the Park
Theatre, and if it should succeed, you have a new and wide field of
exertion opened to you--one in which success is very rare, but for
which your turn of mind has particularly fitted you. (202)
Unsure of expressing her own desire to write a play, Mowatt writes her own
desires into another character (we know that Sargent is a man, but even if we
did not we could guess since the market language--"succeed," "wide field of
exertion"-seems particularly fitted for male discourse), possibly writing the
part of her self that needs to be concealed yisayis the middle class scrutiny of
the woman who exerts herself in the public sphere.26 Sargent answers
Mowatt's query, "What shall I attempt, comedy or tragedy?" by further
inscribing her into the female realm of nineteenth century society when he
says, "Comedy, decidedly, because you can only write what you feel, and you
are—'nothing if not critical'" (202). But the importance of this scene is evident
with Mowatt beginning a pivotal chapter in her autobiography with the
suggestion (or the voice) of another (male) person for her to write a play that
(by that time) she certainly could have done on her own volition.

Other instances of Mowatt's strategy of deflection of self into the voice of
another occur when she is contemplating beginning her career on the public
stage. Mowatt describes the success of Fashion, but, curiously, includes a
deprecating remark from her "sternest" critic Edgar Allan Poe who praised
her acting, but deprecated her writing, remarking that the play "resembled
IhefichooLfoLScmdal in the same degree that the shell of a locust resembles
the living locust" (213).27 Mowatt tells us that Fashion had attracted the

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attention of the elites of the New York theater and that she has been

encouraged by others to begin a career on the stage:
Again I received propositions to go upon the stage, coupled with the
assurance that I would rapidly acquire an independence. The day had
come when all things seemed to work together to force me of necessity
to contemplate this step. (214)
Again we perceive Mowatt's insistence on ascribing her move into the public
sphere, and also into the sphere of the creative imagination, to the
promptings of other voices and opinions. Mowatt turns herself into the
passive force that is "forced" by "necessity" (and encouragement) to pursue a
career, which, ironically, will give her "independence" to act outside of the
traditional roles within the cult of true womanhood. Her decisions do not
come from a self-styled sense of individualism and autonomy, but are based
on second opinions and "coupled" assurances.

Most of Mowatt's actions in the autobiography—her decision to write, act,
and go under the spell of the mesmerist (discussed below) are suggested by
men outside of her family. Interestingly, all of these men-Epes Sargent and
Dr. C--g-are specialists in their field and Mowatt's deference to their opinion
suggests how dependent, by the mid-nineteenth century, middle-class
Americans were on the opinions of men who had specialized their niches in
the pre-industrial, market-oriented republic.28 Indeed, after their marriage,
James Mowatt plays a decidedly minor role in the narrative. It seems that he
is always hovering around Anna in spirit, but after the marriage, he is given
very few words (less than the other men in the autobiography), and
furthermore, Anna never ascribes any of her actions to his prompting (except,
of course, the ill-received "Pelayo"29). It is strange that the student of

Mowatt's autobiography has to read Eric Barnes' biography of the actress in

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order to discover that James Mowatt, in the twilight of his life, asked Anna to

write her autobiography, and she then promised that she would do so. Why
doesn't Mowatt, "faithful historian" that she is, mention this in the text? Of
course, there is a vague allusion to a promise in the last sentence of the
narrative; Anna finishes her story in apparent exhaustion: "I lay down my
pen with a sense of relief, which is in itself a guerdon; for I have fulfilled my
promise" (448). Yet, the casual reader would need to have read Barnes'
biography in order to make the connection. Furthermore, as Barnes tells the
story, Mowatt feverishly writes the text of Autobiograpl1y_Qf__an_Actress
immediately following a life-threatening illness incurred after her final
removal from the stage in 1853. Barnes' re-creation of Mowatt's life is hardly
objective, yet Mowatt's textual clue of exhaustingly fulfilling a promise
suggests that his information is not entirely speculation. During the
convalescence following her illness, or, in Barnes' words, "as soon as she
could be propped up in bed," Anna begins to write "with feverish activity,
scattering the pages on all sides as they were written" (331). It seems strange
that she would be feverish during her convalescence and, furthermore, her
decision to omit mentioning the fact that her husband prompted her to write
her life is a detail that sheds light on the character behind the

autobiographical mask.

Disguising the Performing Self

Among the many questions that Mowatt's autobiography raises, then, is
her use of rhetorical masks and disguises in her efforts to work within the
cult of true womanhood while also challenging its limitations. Through her
rhetorical positionings of self--the mitigation of her private life, her manner

of attributing histrionic talents to an essential aspect of her nature, and her

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rhetorical use of mesmerism, it is clear that Mowatt is doing a fair amount of

masking and veiling of her self in her autobiography in an attempt to
negotiate that space between cultural expectations, immediate necessities, and
her own pursuit of self-fulfillment. This may be why Hawthorne
(ambiguously) called her "artificial."

Mowatt, as a woman operating in the public sphere, has less of herself to
advertise and more of herself to conceal--she has written her public life, but
has clearly drawn a veil over her private thoughts and desires. Except for
instances when Mowatt is consciously attempting to present her domestic self
to the reader, we get very little sense of her private life outside of the stage.
For instance, in the middle of the text Mowatt places the story of her adoption
of three orphan children in between her discussion of the publication of
EyelymAJlomesticJale and Fashion. Mowatt's autobiographical self does
not appear as the romantic, self-governing and autonomous self of male
autobiography. Certainly, Mowatt places herself on the "center stage" merely
by writing her autobiography, yet she feels an ideological compulsion to
surround herself with other figures and voices in order to marshal authority
for the position she has acted and written herself into.

By entering the public realm, the nineteenth century woman was entering
a sphere that was beyond her socially prescriptive role as a woman and,
consequently, placed her under intense public scrutiny. In the public realm,
the nineteenth-century woman lost her acculturated sense of who she was as
a woman and was left to find a place for herself somewhere between the
realms of domesticity and producer capitalism. Consequently, becoming a
public woman necessitated a re-making of the self:

. . . [T]he act of national commercial publication was steeped in

significance. To enter the public realm was for the woman to enter a

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new realm of being. It was in fact a testing of the limits imposed upon

a woman's life, and it suggested the will or the desire on the woman's

part to test or resist those limits. It suggested a new assertion of a

woman's being for simply stated, to be a published writer [or actress]

was to have a visible influence, a public role beyond home. (Kelley 125)
Every woman went about this re-making of the self in a different manner.
Kelley illustrates how the emerging self of her twelve literary domestics
"surfaced in disguise." These women never transformed themselves out of
their domestic roles, but rather masked their private lives (and identities) in
order to perform incognito in the public sphere. As authors, these women
could freely engage in concealment of self (mostly by publishing their work
under another name), but Mowatt, as an actress, had a different problem. The
stage precludes Mowatt from the luxury of concealing her identity and forces
her to take a different tack. Unable to hide from the public scrutiny, Mowatt
manages to turn the tide of public justification for her acts by arguing that her
public self is a natural or essential part of her nature.

If she cannot use a third party to initiate her career, her other strategy is to
attribute her talents and creative impulses to an essential part of her being.
For as theatrical as Mowatt's life was, and despite her awareness of her self as
a pliable social self, Mowatt's insistence and search for a core Anna Cora
Mowatt is truly astonishing. As a woman on the public stage, Mowatt opened
herself up to more of the rniddle—class observation than other nineteenth-
century women who decided to play outside of the realm of domesticity. As a
result, Mowatt's decision to go public with her acting is approached with a
strong sense of pragmatism and necessary justification. When her husband
initially falls ill and they are faced with the prospect of losing their home,

Anna explains her decision to support them through acting:

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Were there no gracious gifts within my nature? Had I no talents I

could use? Had a life made up of delightful associations and poetic
enjoyments unfitted me for exertion? No—there was something strong
within me that cried out, it had not! What, then, could I do to
preserve our home? I had talents for acting—I could go upon the stage;
but that thought only entered my mind to be instantly rejected. The
idea of becoming a professional actress was revolting. (139)
Later, when her first public lectures are declared a success and the threats of
losing her home have passed, Mowatt rhetorically takes herself outside of the
cult of domesticity and places herself in the position of the family
breadwinner when she writes, 'I stood there in thought, exclaiming, 'our
home is seemed; I am mistress here still'" (149). This was an anomalous role
for a middle class, nineteenth century woman:
Males were the economic managers; they were the primary economic
producers beyond the household; and they controlled the distribution
of material resources. There could not have been a clearer, sharper
distinct in the gender-determined economic spheres of influence or
power, in activity or responsibility. Males performed and ruled in the
public sphere; females were subordinate, dependent, and centered in
the private sphere. (Kelley 140)
But since she has couched her entrance into the public realm in terms of an
essential aspect of her nature, the radicalism of Mowatt's statement is
mitigated. Since acting is a natural gift that she has been privileged to
cultivate, using that gift to save her home (even in the most morally
spurious of all spheres, the public stage) cannot be an unnatural

"performance." In a passage that resonates with her earlier justification for

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taking to the public lectem, Mowatt explains her decision to embark on an

acting career as an essential part of her self:
I should never have adopted the stage as matter of expediency alone,
however great the temptations. What I did was not done lightly and
irresponsibly. I reviewed my whole past life, and saw, that from
earliest childhood, my tastes, studies, pursuits had all combined to fit
me for this end. (216)
So for Mowatt, the stage becomes the teleological conclusion to a self that was
"made for the stage." And, of course, explaining herself as a natural-born
actress is ideologically essential for her to create a space for herself on the
stage. Already delving into a sphere that was off-limits to nineteenth-century
woman, the public stage, Mowatt finds it necessary to represent her decision
as a rational, clear thinking move that is as natural as breathing.30 This is a
particularly interesting rhetorical move because she has effectively stumped
the middle class / Victorian world view of the essential self by searching, and
discovering (of all things) a performer at her core.

The stage of the first half of the nineteenth century was an arena where the
dichotomized social roles of men and women was evident. As Claudia
Johnson notes, "few professional situations could be as paradoxical as that of
the nineteenth-century woman who went on the stage for a livelihood" (66).
The stage was a place associated with men's activities--it required self
initiative and reliance along with a large dose of individualism. Women
who entered public life through the theater stage embarked on journey into
the world of pre-industrial capitalism—they bargained, competed, negotiated,
and sold. Ironically, an energetic theater required just as many actresses as it
did actors. And it is important to realize that along with the proto-industrial

economy, there was a large increase in the public demand for theater in the

86
second quarter of the nineteenth century. Also I have not come across any

instances where men played women's roles on the stage, but all through the
nineteenth century, it was common for women to perform men's roles on
the public stage. Despite the need for women performers, the stage was not
considered a sphere for women to operate in. Consider the ideas of Robert
Turnbull in 1837:
The effect of the kind of life led by players is peculiarly pernicious to
female character. It strips it of all its loftier attributes, its softer and
more delicate charms. Sensibility, modesty, and refinement are
gradually extinguished by the unfeminine and indelicate business of
the stage, and nothing is left but the hackneyed and haggard form of
infuse humanity, covered and bedecked perhaps, by false and tawdry
ornaments. (quoted in Johnson 92)

Mowatt, too, uses her life as a performer to illustrate the social
construction of gender in the nineteenth century. Acting on the stage
becomes a metaphor for Mowatt to illustrate the different social selves she is
expected to perform in "daily life" and in the writing of her autobiography. In
chapter XIII, the section titled, "Two Schools of Acting," Mowatt has written
gender roles into the acting profession. Mowatt defines herself as a part of the
first school which is comprised of the actor who "totally loses his own
individuality, and abandons himself to all the absorbing emotions that belong
to the character he interprets" (241). This school is associated with femininity
as these actors lose themselves in their parts, dissolving their own selves into
the parts they are playing, or at least as they have interpreted those parts. For
actors of this school, "his tears are real, his laughter real, as real to himself as

to the audience. Frequently they are more real to himself than to his

87
listeners; for the capacity of feeling, and the faculty of expressing the sensation

experienced, are widely different" (241).

The second school of acting is associated with the masculine ideal. Mowatt
clearly admires this second school, the "grand and passionless" mode of
performance, but admits that she cannot "belong" to it-"No amount of study
or discipline would have enabled me to belong to the grand and passionless
school" (241). Consider this:

The actor of the opposite school . . . is more certain of producing
startling effects. He stands unmoved amidst the boisterous seas, the
whirlwinds of passion, swelling around him. He exercises perfect
command over the emotions of the audience; seems to hold their
heartstrings in his hands, to play upon their sympathies as on an
instrument; to electrify or subdue his hearers by an effort of volition;
but not a pulse in this own frame beats more rapidly than its wont. His
personations are cut out of marble; they are grand, sublime, but no
heart throbs within the life-like sculpture. This absolute power over
others, combined with perfect self-command, is pronounced by a
certain class of critics the perfection of dramatic art. (242)

The actor from this school is clearly in charge; he "stands, exercises,"
"electrif[ies]," and "subdues." Unlike the actor from the first school, who is
oftentimes more affected by his or her performances than the audience, the
actor from the grand and passionless school molds and shapes the audience
with the projection of his or her performance. And, moreover, the actors
from this second school have the uncanny ability of removing themselves
from their stage roles in order to comment on the affects of their

performances on the audience. For instance, during a staging of The

Stranger, Mowatt relates how, after a particularly melodramatic and affecting

88
scene, the gentleman playing "The Stranger" (and a member of the second

school of acting) turned to her and "whispered in the most lachrymose voice,
'Poor things, they [the audience] want umbrellas in front!” And, then, in the
very next breath, managed to pronounce a series of fateful words that send
the audience into further anguish and sobbing. But Mowatt, inscribed into
the ideology of the cult of true womanhood as she is, yet admiring and even
appropriating masculine ideals of working in the public sphere in addition to
using and developing her intellect, "never succeeded in stirring the hearts of
others unless I was deeply affected myself" (244).

In her study of premodern women autobiographers, Mary Mason argues
that the social construction of gender results in fundamentally different
autobiographical visions of men and women:

Nowhere in women's autobiographies do we find the patterns
established by the two prototypical male autobiographers, Augustine
and Rousseau; and conversely male writers never take up the
archetypal models of Julian, Margery Kempe, Margaret Cavendish, and
Anne Bradstreet. The dramatic structure of conversion that we find in
Augustine's Confessions, where the self is presented as the stage for a
battle of opposing forces and where a climactic victory for one force-
spirit defeating flesh—completes the drama of the self, simply does not
accord with the deepest realties of women's experience and so is
inappropriate as a model for women's life writing. (210)
The sovereign "I" of male autobiography and the Romantic and egoistic
conception of the self as imperial and central to consciousness is foreign to
women's autobiography. One of the differences, Mason argues, between
men's and women's autobiography is women's use of an alter ego, or "other"

self, that operates along the margins of ideology and functions to deflect the

89
ideological challenges that women writing presents to the dominant

discourse.

On the contrary, . . . the self-discovery of female identity seems to
acknowledge the real presence and recognition of another
consciousness, and the disclosure of female self is linked to the
identification of some "other." This recognition of another
consciousness—and I emphasize recognition rather than deference-this
grounding of identity thorough relation to the chosen other, seems . . .
to enable women to write openly about themselves. (210)

Mowatt uses her mesmeric experiences to explore a "double
consciousness" that acts as a rhetorical device similar to Mason's notions of
the alter ego in women's autobiography. Early in her autobiography, Mowatt
falls sick and, consequently, undergoes her first mesmeric experience which
she then uses as a tool to construct a narrative alter ego that leads her along
paths of self-discovery and self-assertion, and, more importantly, deflects the
criticism of the public gaze that she had attracted in her role on the public
stage. But while Mowatt demonstrates her challenges to the cult of
domesticity, she also casts herself into the role of the cult of true womanhood.
She is a loyal and devoted daughter and wife, and represents herself as a
paragon example of the four "cardinal virtues of womanhood" (piety, purity,
submissiveness, and domesticity) that Barbara Welter talks about in Dimity
Conyictions. Despite her unbreakable will and energy, Mowatt still
represents herself as a frail and sickly woman and, in this way, she tips her
hat to the nineteenth century ideological assumption of the physical
vulnerability of the middle class woman. Aware of the embodiment of
nineteenth-century woman, Mowatt writes her numerous illnesses, frailties

and "brain fevers" into her autobiography. Pressures from her life on the

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public stage often wear her down to the point where she is bedridden for

weeks. Following her initial foray into the public spotlight, her illness is so
acute that it takes a mesmerist to bring her back to health. Mowatt describes
her illnesses with the same vigorous and dramatic language she uses to
explain her career on the stage. Yet, the reader might pause when,
intermingled with these anecdotes of her frailty, Mowatt adds experiences
that have her trekking across the eastern half of the States in an effort to get
home for the holidays and her stalwart manner of approaching the grueling
demands of her career on the stage. Mesmerism was a highly gender-specific
cure for the emotional ills that Mowatt suffered from; characteristically,
however, Mowatt places herself under the mesmerist's spell (and, hence,
confirms her place in women's sphere) only to use the experience to push at
the boundaries of her socially prescribed position. By letting herself go under
the influence of the (male) mesmerist, Mowatt cagily positions herself within
the definitions of nineteenth-century womanhood--she is "put under" by
male conjurings and then becomes the ideal embodiment of a patriarchal
culture when she loses herself to his contrivances. But Mowatt turns the
tables, and instead of "losing" her"self," in many ways, she "looses" herself
from limitations of identity and action.

Mowatt first enters the public sphere when she gives a series of poetry
readings in Boston in 1841. Following her first foray onto the public stage,
Mowatt falls sick-wailing, no doubt, from the anxiety and pressure of her new
life and public role. Mowatt is encouraged to go under the mesmerist's spell
by another male, Dr. C—g, who says, "If she is susceptible to mesmerism, I
think she can be relieved more readily than by any medicine that I could
administer" (158). The first mesmeric experience is short in duration, but it

leaves her much relieved. But her headaches, coughing fits (she suffered

91
from consumption) and anxieties continue and she begins to rely on the

mesmerized state as an antidote to her sufferings. In a letter written to her
from a friend, the writer says he saw Mowatt mesmerized "several hundred
times," which, despite the popularity of the medium, seems like quite a lot of
mesmerizing for one woman. In her autobiography, Mowatt tells some
frankly frightening stories about her mesmeric experiences, all of which deal
with her losing consciousness for long periods of times--sometimes up to two
weeks. In his biography of Mowatt, Eric Barnes explains that for three
months following her initial mesmeric experience, Mowatt "lived
increasingly in a strange world of dreams and fantasies" (92). In an anecdote
that is difficult for a skeptical late-twentieth century reader to believe, Barnes
notes that Mowatt developed a distinct personality, or alter ego, while
mesmerized. "The gypsy," became the Anna Cora Mowatt behind the veil.
This part of Mowatt's self was a seer and visionary. Communicating with
angels, discoursing about medicine and metaphysics, and writing poetry, "the
gypsy," condescendingly refers to the waking Anna Cora Mowatt as "the
simpleton" (92).

What is disturbingly eerie about Mowatt's mesmerism is the way the men
of her life hover about and record and control her actions and responses.
Mowatt becomes an object of fascination to the men who are in charge of her
health. Indeed, throughout the autobiography, for as much as Mowatt asserts
her own sense of who she is, who she wants to be, there are always (male)
forces that are pushing her in certain directions. Yet, when Mowatt uncovers
another part of her self she directly challenges the male voices and
machinations which are clearly attempting to embody her according to their
own visions her female identity. Even Mowatt, though, is frightened by the

prospect of another form of consciousness and demonstrates one of the

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anxieties that a republican nation had with the mesmeric experience: "I soon

grew impatient at this apparent surrender of free will--one of Heaven's
choicest gifts to man. I was annoyed at being told that I had spoken, done, or
written things of which I had no recollection" (161). Despite her own fears,
Mowatt continues to use mesmerism as an antidote for her discomforts.
Anna Cora Mowatt's autobiography is a rich (yet neglected) text providing
insights into the middle-class world view of mid nineteenth-century
America. As an articulate, brave, and intelligent woman, Mowatt managed to
use her acting and writing ability to negotiate a space between her social self
and the self she finally ends up constructing. In Mowatt's rhetoric, we see
neither radical attempts to change her subject position, nor quiet passivity yis
a_yis_patriarchal domination. Rather, her life and the life she inscribes in
Autobiography_of_an_Actress, the life that Hawthorne and 18,000 other
American readers found so interesting, is one of negotiation and cultural

exchange of a self-stylized self.

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Notes

1Hawthorne was serving as an American consul in Liverpool at the time.

2But Hawthorne and Sophia would become close friends with Anna's sister,
Mary Ogden Thompson, during their stay in Rome, 1858-1859.

3Hawthorne reports to William Ticknor on 30 September 1854 that he has
been asked to send half a dozen books to his English friend, Monckton
Milnes.

4 By this, time, however, Mowatt has remarried and taken the name Ritchie.

5See Havens's chapter on Mowatt where he argues that Fashion represents
the coming of age of the nineteenth-century American theater, placing the
drama at the end of the line of experimenters in American social comedy:
"Mrs. Mowatt's Fashion_stands, not falls, upon its foundation of the native
tradition begun by Tyler and developed by generations of playwrights soon
forgotten" (147).

6See Barnes 104; and Mowatt 186.

7See Shafer.

8Grimsted mentions some observers who supported and argued for a
developing American theater, but he notes that, for the most part, the theater
never gained widespread support (23).

9McConachie shows how theater in the 18205 up to 1845 was divided along
class lines in his discussions on the urban drama of the Age of Jackson.
Theaters in the 205 were funded by elites who used the stage to confirm their
positions in society (both through the actual plays performed and also
through the spatial positioning of the spectators). In the 305, though, an
urban working class theater developed, and, as a result, "working-class
attendance at fashionable playhouses began to decline in the 18305 as workers
shifted their patronage to other theaters offering plays more appealing to their
aesthetic and social values" (8). And while respectable women did not
attend the "yeoman melodrama" and urban melodrama from 1820 to 1845,
most theaters provided a separate tier for prostitutes.

10See Douglas's arguments regarding the feminization of Protestant
ministers in antebellum America, especially Chapters One and Two.

11See Grimsted, Chapters Four and Five, for a discussion of the status of
actors and actresses in the nineteenth century.

12See Barnes 136; and Halttunen, Chapter Six.

13See Tryon and Charvat, eds., for a detailed publication history of Mowatt's
autobiography (271-90).

14For a critical response to academic discussions of the Cult of True
Womanhood, see Cogan. Cogan confronts the interpretation of nineteenth-
century womanhood that academics such as Barbara Welter, Lois Banner, and
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg have posited, asserting that the popular conception

94

of True Womanhood—the frail, shy, and demure representations popularly
represented in novels and advice literature--was not as homogeneously
accepted by nineteenth-century women as scholars have been arguing.
Arguing for a model of the Ideal of the Real Woman or Real Womanhood,
Cogan uncovers a cultural discourse that resisted and reacted against the Cult
of True Womanhood: "My point is simply to suggest that it is very likely,
based on didactic literature and popular novels-primary sources both—that
more than one popular ideal for middle-class American women existed and
was embraced between 1840 and 1880" (9).

15See Brodhead, "Veiled Ladies: Toward a History of Antebellum

Entertainment," in Cultures_Qf_Letters.
165ee Sklar.

17The different visions of women's role in society of Beecher and Stanton
represent the fundamental differences between the feminist perspective and
the domestic perspective of mid-nineteenth century. Sklar sees Beecher as a
reformer working in a middle class consensus and arguing for two separate
and essentially different spheres of men and women: "In this time of great
social and political ferment, Catherine Beecher deemed it more prudent to
consolidate the culture around known female and male virtues and to
mediate class and race issues by creating a new female caste" (137). This view
is opposed to early feminists such as the Grimke sisters and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton who argued the separation of men and women into different spheres
only served to oppress women.

18See Tompkins' introduction, Chapters Five and Six.

191 am thinking specifically of two of Mowatt's contemporaries, Henry David
Thoreau and Walt Whitman, who were busy imagining and writing their
own lives at the very same time Mowatt was writing her autobiography.

20Mowatt handles the entire courtship in less than six pages. The oddity of
the courtship between James and Anna cannot be attributed to the mores of a
different age because, as Barbara Welter illustrates, nineteenth century middle
class society discouraged women from marrying young-or at least until their
first menstruation period which they marked at about fifteen years old. Even
Samuel Olden, Anna's father, could find no fault with James Mowatt, but
when asked to give his consent to their marriage asked for a promise that
they would wait until Anna was seventeen. Mowatt cannot wait, however,
and after pressing Anna to elope, he finally convinces her--during her
fifteenth year. For more on nineteenth—century mores and habits regarding
courtship, see Ellen Rothman.

21James uses these lines to characterize his initial feelings for Anna: "O,
there are looks and tones that dart/ An instant sunshine through the
heart/As though the soul that moment caught/ Some object it through life
had sought" (44).

22See 155, 188, 213, 271, 283, 292, 299, 324, 326, 373, 406. Also see Mowatts
W her critical commentary on art critics.

95

235ee Kelley 128-138.

24Of course the articles, which are "sketches celebrating persons" she had
known and were "generally found on fact," were associated with the male
tradition of writing from the intellect, so the pseudonym was a necessary
device. But the verses, written from the heart and exuding emotion were
associated with the female imagination and could properly be published
under how own name.

25Again, this is very different from the way men imagined other men
writing. Auerbach explains how Carlyle, in -

creates a Shakespeare for nineteenth century readers
who did not create his literature from artifice, but rather "secrete[d]" his
works from his essential being (4).

26ES. makes another interesting remark when he refers to the "sarcastic
ebullitions" that Mowatt "constantly indulges" her friends with. We might
pause to wonder about this, too, because, so far, Mowatt has not represented
herself as sarcastic. Could this be, again, her surreptitious way of writing parts
of her "self" into the text--sensibilities that would have been scrutinized by
the middle class?

27For a detailed discussion of Poe's critical discourse on Mowatt's acting
career see Barnes, Chapter Thirteen. Also, see Havens's notes for further
references.

28See Bledstein.

29 As Mowatt relates the story, her first foray into the public sphere was an ill-
received poem, "Pelayo," penned under the pseudonym, Isabella. The poem
is roundly shouted down by the critics as inane doggerel and Mowatt
confesses, "I wrote no more under the signature of "Isabel." My greatest
desire now was to preserve my incognito" (69). Ironically, it was her husband,
who encouraged Mowatt to produce and then publish this ill-received poem.

30111 this way, Mowatt seems to be paying tacit heed to the Cult of Sincerity of
the nineteenth century. See Halttunen, especially Chapters Two and Three.

Chapter Three
The Exhibition of the Theatrical Self and Other in the Life and Writings of

RT. Barnum

P.T. Barnum has been the subject of numerous biographies and a few
critical studies. He appears in the critical literature of American culture as an
episodic figure who pops in and out of texts that synthesize the American
experience, generally playing a minor role in the critical reconstruction and
analysis of nineteenth-century culture. Barnum represents both the problem
and the promise of nineteenth-century America, embodying some of its most
salient tensions. On one hand, we might celebrate his ingenuity, lively
rhetoric, and creative passion. Barnum became the most formidable
showman of the nineteenth century, institutionalizing a democratic popular
culture and organizing spectacular public extravaganzas that seduced and
occupied the nineteenth-century imagination. On the other hand, Barnum's
antics are inexcusable and he remains a representative figure for the
problematical nature of the early republic's exploitative and racist
inclinations. His career is marked by the shameless and thoughtless public
exhibition of human aberrations for profit. Furthermore, Barnum's public
display of wild and exotic animals and the methods he contrived in bringing
his beasts to New York are enough to make any conservationist cringe. His
imperialism and racism, of which he seems almost wholly unaware, are
shocking at times. Yet, Barnum is a representative figure primarily because of
his fulfillment of the promise of the republic and his unpleasantly
conspicuous racism and imperialist tendencies. Finally, it is too easy, and
ultimately dull labor, to deconstruct Barnum and sacrifice him in an effort to

clear the good name of American experience, and I certainly do not intend to

96

97
do that in this chapter. The tendencies operating within the critical

commentaries on Barnum have been to lift him up, rather unquestioningly,
as the progenitor of a democratic popular culture and mitigate the inherent
problems of his exhibitions and displays. Even Neil Harris, who has written a
sparkling biography of Barnum that gracefully places the showman in his
cultural milieu, is more inclined to celebrate Barnum's contribution to a
democratic "operational aesthetic" than he is to illustrate the problems
involved with an institutional mode of public entertainment where free
white men and women exercise their democratic rights and minds by gaping,
wondering, and discoursing about the authenticity of a 161-year old black
woman who alleges to have been George Washington's nursemaid, or a pin-
headed black man who is passed off to the public as a primordial missing link.

My aim in this essay is to read Barnum into an American culture of
exhibition that I see developing in the second quarter of the nineteenth
century. Through a discussion of the publication history of Barnum's
autobiographies and a textual analysis of his first narrative, IheLife_of_F,I,
BarnumJflrittenijfimseLf, I will show how and why Barnum "exhibited"
his self to the antebellum public. Yet Barnum's participation in nineteenth-
century exhibition culture went beyond the stylized presentation of self.
Through a discussion of Barnum's first public exhibition, the old slave
woman, Joice Heth, a blackfacing incident Barnum mentions in the Life, and
the famous Jenny Lind American tour of 1850, I will show how the
nineteenth century's greatest showman created sites of public pleasure (and
profit) while famously theatricalizing the lives of others.

Barnum embodied many of the primary tensions of nineteenth-century
life and performed a curious kind of cultural work in nineteenth-century

America. He orchestrated cultural performances and exhibitions, produced

98
narratives and advertisements for public consumption and debate, and

achieved a public role as the nineteenth century's greatest showman.
Barnum was indeed the public manager of nineteenth-century American
popular culture.

In Barnum's autobiography and his public actions/ exhibitions, the
showman challenged mid nineteenth-century Americans with the problems
of inessential selfhood and the implications of the performative self.
Ironically, Barnum's challenge to nineteenth century selfhood was cloaked in
rhetorical disguises which confirmed the culture's dominant ways of
thinking; that is, RT. Barnum worked within and courted the sentimental
values of the American public at the same time that he was implicitly
challenging them. The performative self that Barnum donned before the
public gaze (whether it was the different Barnums of his autobiography or the
many human exhibitions he displayed throughout his career as a showman)
was gleefully applauded and vociferously discussed in the public sphere.

By 1855 we can see in the figure and autobiography of PT. Barnum the
theatricality of selfhood, the masking and disguising of the self and of the
Other, as an acceptable, even profitable, practice. Like his predecessor, Stephen
Burroughs, Barnum engages in cultural ventriloquism and plots of masking
and disguising. Yet, by 1855, the problem of the theatrical self that P.T.
Barnum presents is applauded and consumed. When Barnum exhibited his
freaks, dwarfs, and Divas, he was challenging the American public to accept
the pliant and adorned nature of self; Barnum exhibited theatrical selfhood to
the public--and they bought it. In his autobiography, as well as his life,
Barnum worked out the problem of selfhood on the debit and credit sheets of
his financial records. For Barnum, it does not matter that "things are not

what they seem."1 "Not knowing" or the inability to distinguish the illusion

99
from reality is no longer an epistemological conundrum posing a threat to

the republic and the good order of society. The gulf between public and
private perception, or between reality and illusion, is less threatening when
someone like Barnum (who understands the importance of consensus and
confirmation of dominant world views) is orchestrating the public perception
of the self. Instead, the theatrical self that rises up from epistemological
subjectivity is celebrated. By mid-century, the theatricality of self had become
a normal part of American life that entertained, diverted, and challenged the
masses. Barnum recasts the problem of "self" representation of the post-
Revolutionary period by turning the problem into an entertainment for the
masses.
Re-Making the Autobiographical Self:

P.T. Barnum was only forty-five when he wrote the first of three versions
of his autobiography in the fall of 1854. W
Himself was published by Redfield in January of 1855 and, according to Carl
Bode, promptly sold 160,000 copies in the States (Intro. StnuggleLand
Iriumphs 19). The book was subsequently published by Sampson Low of
London, and soon thereafter pirated editions were appearing in Germany,
France, Holland, and Sweden. When the sales of Life started to decline,
Barnum destroyed the plates, intent on publishing another version of his life.
The second autobiography, updated, altered, and renamed StruggleLand
IWWWMMM was published in
1869. By 1882 half a million copies of the 1869 edition were published, and by
1888, the figure had reached one million. The final version of Barnum's life
was published in 1889, two years before his death, and appeared under the

same name as the 1869 version. Carl Bode announces that sales figures to the

100
1889 edition are not available, "but we can be certain that they were huge"

(Intro. Stu-18W 24).2

If any book of the nineteenth century is worth considering for its
circulation within the culture, it is surely the three versions of Barnum's
autobiography. "For the American people during the second half of the
nineteenth century," notes Bode, "Barnum's autobiography became, after the
Bible, the most widely read book" (Intro. Stnigglesandjriumphs 23). Each of
the three editions has a tenor and tone of its own and each reflects a different
P.T. Barnum. The 1855 edition is anecdotal, primarily concentrating on
Barnum's early life. Spontaneous, artless, and full of the "confessions" of the
narrator, Barnum's Life has all the stylistic attributes of autobiography. The
first 100 pages read like the tale of a Yankee trickster and work to establish
Barnum as a born jokester who, as "The Prince of Humbugs" and "The Prince
of Showman," is merely acting out his innate talents and abilities.

Barnum trimmed down the anecdotes for the 1869 edition, spending more
time on Tom Thumb and the Jenny Lind enterprise, but the book was still a
formidable affair, running over 700 pages (the 1855 edition is just over 400).
Barnum was never happy with the 1855 edition; he considered the first
autobiography to be a form of advertisement, explaining that Life was
designed "for the purpose, principally, of advancing my interests as proprietor
of the American Museum" (Bryan xviii). By 1869, he was waxing
philosophical and talked about the second edition of his life as

the matured and leisurely review of almost half a century of work and
struggle, and final success, in spite of fraud and fire—the story of which
is blended with amusing anecdotes, funny passages, felicitous jokes,
captivating narratives, novel experiences, and remarkable interviews-

the sunny and somber so intermingled as not only to entertain, but

101
convey useful lessons to all classes of readers. (Stmgglesmdjriumphs
46)

But, for Barnum, high-mindedness never got in the way of making a buck:
the 1869 edition was brought out in a dazzling number of different imprints-
small print, large print, abridged versions, and both cheap and expensive
styles of the autobiography inundated the American and English reading
public. Moreover, Barnum persisted in making unprecedented
autobiographical moves by continuing to write chapters and tacking them on
to new editions of the 1869 version. By 1884, Bryan records Barnum's
announcement that the book was open to be published by any interested
party: "The whole or any portion of this book may be published by any parties
without objection or claim of copyright on the part of the Author" (xx).3 In
the 18805, Barnum as much as gave the book away during his circus
performancesncopies of the book were piled on carts and given to paying
spectators, and the showman was known to remark that the crowds leaving
his bigtop looked "as if they were coming out of a circulation library" (xxii)
Few twentieth-century critics have taken Barnum's autobiographies
seriously. Constance Rourke dedicates a chapter of Inimpetsofllubilee to the
Barnum legend, calling the book a "flowing bowl of candor" (276). Ludwig
Lewishohn, an anti-genteel commentator working in the shadow of Van
Wyck Brooks, placed the book in the American folk tradition:
Only one Yankee of a humbler stripe wrote a book in the high days of
the New England pseudo-classics which also belongs to the folk-
literature of America. That book was, of course, the autobiography of
Phineas T. Barnum. (103)
Referring to himself in the third person, Lewisohn recalls his first childhood

reading of the book and the deep impression it made on him:

102
He read that with a severe absorption and in the course of the next few

years returned to it again and again and carried throughout many
succeeding years with him a hundred images and incidents from the
homespun narrative which communicated somehow the very tone
and taste and tang of American life. . . . Barnum, rogue and vulgarian,
wrote out what he thought and saw and dreamed and knew. (103-4)
Since Lewisohn, most of the other critics to consider Barnum's
autobiography have been his biographers. George Bryan has called the
autobiography "an abounding book, quick with native gusto. It is the work of
a man thoroughly enjoying his world, his work, and himself" (xxii). "Taking
the autobiography, then, as just a human document, and ignoring its
deliberately instructive features," continues Bryan, "we encounter a full,
leisurely narrative, done with vast relish" (xxxiii). Neil Harris astutely places
the showman and his book in his nineteenth-century cultural milieu,
explaining that the book "raised complicated and diverse issues" about
"credulity and deceit, disguise and sincerity, hypocrisy and idealism, [and] art
and artifice" (Humbug 230). For Harris, the book is not "simply the chronicle
of a life, but a text on the social functions of illusion and the role of the
deceiver in an egalitarian society"-a society that had "abandoned traditional
rituals of accreditation" (Humbug 230-31). Barnum's most recent biographer,
A.S. Saxon, has called the Life "a strangely disquieting book" (9) and in his
1989 study of American autobiography, Alteredjgos, G. Thomas Couser has
taken a different tack from Rourke by placing Barnum's book in the tradition
of Franklin's autobiography, explaining both as narratives of confidence
which undermined the integrity of the autobiographical act.4
Barnum's first autobiography incorporates aspects of the picaresque novel,

instructional literature, and Yankee trickster/ Southwestern humor tales all

103
told in an authorial voice that explicates, narrates, and even confesses the

actions and events of the life of PT. Barnum. Life is a cornucopia of
American literary traditions; the shadows of Ben Franklin, Stephen
Burroughs, and Jonathan Edwards,5 and the legends of Mike Fink and Davy
Crockett are lurking within its anecdotal, bombastic, and didactic rhetoric. As
a boy, he hangs out with thugs and gleefully proclaims his "aversion to hard
work" and the fact that he "had the reputation of being the laziest boy in
town" (Life 28).6 When he goes to New York as a young boy he squanders
the dollar his mother gave him on molasses candy. Barnum has an eye for
maverick characters who challenge orthodoxy and are apt to dupe
unsuspecting individuals. It is the apparent lack of narrative direction and
the homely metaphors and anecdotes that give Life its native charm. Yet it
is the linear progression of a self that moves from a small-town wag to a big-
shot showman who occupies and manipulates the public mind of the
nineteenth-century that becomes the strongest selling point of this most
"American" of books. "In this country," Constance Rourke says while
explaining the popularity of Barnum's autobiography, "Barnum's rise from
humble origins, his struggles with adversity, his achievement of fortune were
discovered as evidences of the American genius; he was hailed as a national
example" (276).

Furthermore, by continually re-writing his life, Barnum becomes one of
the many unreliable (not untrustworthy) narrators of American literary
discourse. Despite the confessional tone and the occasional attempts to reveal
a private self, Barnum's first autobiography remains a highly stylized
narrative construction of a public persona and, consequently, tends toward
fiction. 7 The autobiographical act is collapsed into fiction when it is realized

that "autobiography is necessarily a partial account of one's life: to write an

104
autobiography is to 'fix' one's life in more ways than one" (Couser 66). Less

than "self-biography" and tending more toward the fictive invention of self,
Barnum's Life becomes a "hopelessly subjective" autobiographical fiction
(Spengemann xiii; Couser 66). Roland Hagenbuchle has called the unreliable
narrator a particularly American rhetorical construction of the nineteenth
century: "In view of the epistemological crisis in post-Revolutionary
American culture, it is hardly surprising that the 'unreliable narrator' is an
American invention, and 'unreliable narratives continue to be a specifically
American device that . . . achieves its climax in the work of James at the end
of the century" (132). Barnum, as he narrates his own life, aligns himself
with predecessors such as Ben Franklin, Clara Wieland, James from
Crevecoeur's Letters, Miles Coverdale, and Ishmael.

Barnum "exhibits" a dynamic sense of selfhood in his autobiography;
with each new edition, Barnum presents himself anew to his readers-each
subsequent edition creates a new P.T. Barnum, replacing and adding on to the
former. Couser said as much when he explained that "Barnum made a habit,
and a career, of exploiting the elusiveness of identity—impersonation was part
of his stock-in-trade as a showman" (54). The Life uncovers the inherent
subjectivity of writing a life by flamboyantly flaunting that life's malleability
in the face of the reader. The revisions of Barnum's autobiography, if they
mean or do anything, demonstrate an inessential self, a self that transforms
itself with the passage of time and the continual (re)act of writing. Barnum's
notion of a "malleable" or dynamic self, illustrated in each re-writing of the
autobiography, then, reveals and exposes the elusiveness of essential self
identity.

Paul deMan has declared that all texts are autobiographical and that

autobiography is particularly theatrical in the sense that it "demonstrates in a

105
striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is the

impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of
tropological substitutions" (922). In rewriting his autobiography, Barnum
becomes a chronicler of the self, who, with every new edition of his life, re-
creates his self by writing over the top of the former self and, consequently,
challenging the notion of essential, innate selfhood. Barnum amplified and
enlarged his life with the re-publication and re-writing of each autobiography.
Couser finds this problematical, complaining that the Life "very nearly makes
an autobiography out of practical jokes, and a joke out of autobiography" (53).
Ultimately, argues Couser, the "effect of his prolific production and
circulation of different accounts of his life during the second half of the
nineteenth century was to undermine the authority of his own
autobiography and, by implication, that of the genre as a whole" (53-54).
Possibly. But Barnum was never anyone who was overly concerned with
authority (especially the "textual" authority of a genre--the slippage here
between Couser's expectations and Barnum's intentions is glaring) and like
his contemporary, Walt Whitman (who published the first of nine editions of
his autobiography in 1855), Barnum multiplied the autobiographical moment
as an act of self advertisement. With the subsequent publications of the
autobiography Barnum validated a sense of stylized selfliood in American
culture. The autobiographical act corrals experience forming a public self and,
in this way, autobiography becomes an achievement of self-construction and
the rhetorical shaping of a public persona.

Mistaken identities, the concealment of self (masking and disguising), and
public hoaxes--nefarious situations in the early Republic--become whimsical
anecdotal devices in Barnum's book. The treachery that accompanied

duplicitous selfhood in the texts of Burroughs and Cooper has been turned

106
into benign, even congenial, yarns and fables. In his Lite, Barnum is reckless

to the point of flippancy about the implications of mistaken identities in his
narrative. Early in the narrative, while Barnum is setting himself up as the
prototypical Yankee trickster, he reveals his first anecdote regarding the
duplicitous presentation of self. In this first illustration of mistaken identity
in his Life, Barnum uses the figure of a clergyman to playfully jeer at the old-
guard Puritans. The clergy is a particular target for Barnum's anti-
institutional vision; indeed, for as much of a bamboozler and agent of
duplicity that Barnum was, he is wont to uncover false pretensions and
piousness in his Connecticut neighbors. Asserting his "sincere respect" for the
clerical calling, Barnum remarks the sad reality that "as the 'best fruit is most
pecked by the birds,‘ so also is the best cause most liable to be embraced by
hypocrites; and we all have learned, with pain and sorrow, that the title
'Rev.‘ does not necessarily imply a saint, for nothing can prevent our
sometimes being deceived by a 'wolf in sheep's clothing'" (44). In Barnum's
anecdote the Reverend Richard Varick Dey, is an intelligent and eccentric
preacher from Greenfield, Connecticut, whose "pathos and wit" scares the
more "strait-laced" deacons and parishioners. Dey has been accused of heresy
and is enroute to his own trial before an ecclesiastical council when he
serendipitously meets another clergyman who has been picked as a judge in
Dey's trial. Dey learns all this information before he divulges anything to his
judge and when the time comes for Dey to "present" his identity to his fellow
clergyman, he misrepresents himself, calling himself Mr. Richard from
Fairfield. An amusing dialogue of misunderstanding and double entendre
ensues while Dey performs a role as his "not" self and thoroughly

embarrasses his colleague at the trial when it is revealed to the unsuspecting

107
judge that the man he was talking with the day before was none other than

the accused, Richard Dey.

Later in the narrative, Barnum gleefully reports a number of incidents
involving his own role in similar performances of deception. Concealing his
own identity for a time, he engages in conversation with a stranger, asks
some leading questions to which the stranger, unsuspecting of whom 5/ he is
talking with, responds with an honesty and an assurance that leads to
embarrassment after learning that it was "old Barnum" himself who was
acting as the questioner. 8 A typical example occurs in "Bragging Too Fast" in
which the showman recalls sitting in a barber shop9 the night after giving a
lecture on "The Philosophy of Humbug." The ticket taker also happened to
be there and, not knowing Barnum's face, enters into an unwitting and
embarrassing conversation with the showman who asks a series of leading
questions without divulging his identity. The highly stylized scene is
representative of other incidents of mistaken identity in the Life and also
serves as a nice illustration of Barnum's narrative style:

"Did Barnum make a good speech," I asked.

"I did not hear it. . . . But it makes not difference whether it was
good or not . . . the people will go to see old Barnum. First he
humbugs them, and then they pay to hear him tell how he did
it! I believe if he should swindle a man out of twenty dollars,
the man would give a quarter to hear him tell about it."
"Barnum must be a curious chap," I remarked.

"Well, I guess he is up to all the dodges."

"Do you know him?"

"Not personally," he replied, "but I always get into the Museum
for nothing. I know the doorkeeper, and he slips me in free."

108
"'Old Barnum' would not like that, probably, if he knew it," I

remarked. (375)

The conversation continues in this vein until Barnum leaves, the customers
inform the ticket taker who he had been talking to, and his embarrassment is
manifest in his "chop-fallen" face the next time he ran into "old Barnum" at
the Museum.10

Barnum orchestrates and relishes other plots of mistaken identity
throughout the text. When Jenny Lind made her triumphant tour of
America in 1850 she was mobbed by adoring crowds that congregated to catch
a glimpse of the Swedish Nightingale. In Philadelphia a crowd gathered
outside their hotel, demanding to see the Diva. Jenny was fearful of crowds
and Barnum "tried to induce the crowd to disperse," but they refused (320).
Unwilling to disturb Jenny, Barnum dressed her traveling companion in the
star's shawl and bonnet and promenaded her before the crowd who gave
three cheers and "quietly dispersed" (320). The incident seems innocuous
enough, but Barnum closes on the following note: "Miss Lind was so utterly
averse to anything like deception, that we never ventured to tell her the part
which her bonnet and shawl had played in the absence of their owner" (320).

Other incidents of mistaken identity occur on the Jenny Lind tour and

Barnum continues to relate them with interest: One Sunday morning
Barnum's daughter, Caroline, is mistaken for Jenny Lind when,
accompanying a friend to a Baltimore church service, she happened to sit in
the section reserved for the choir. Some of the parishioners recognized
Caroline with Barnum the day before and immediately concluded that
Caroline was Jenny Lind. Barnum tells the story with typical delight:

A number of the congregation, who had seen Caroline with me the day

previous, and supposed her to be Jenny Lind, were yet laboring under

109
the same mistake, and it was soon whispered through the church that

Jenny Lind was in the choir! The excitement was worked to its highest
pitch when my daughter arose as one of the musical group. Every ear
was on the alert to catch the first notes of her voice, and when the
notes gushed forth, glances of satisfaction passed through the assembly.

(320)

The congregants continue to react to the false Jenny Lind, blocking Caroline's
passage out of the church and continuing to boast, "in good faith, that they
had listened to the extraordinary singing of the great Swedish songstress"
(320). Similar incidents follow. In New Orleans, Barnum clears a path
through a throng of admirers when he disguises Caroline in Jenny's shawl
and bonnet, veils her face, and escorts her through an unsuspecting crowd
who again mistake his daughter for Jenny. The crowd is satisfied they have
seen "Jenny" and disperses; minutes later, Jenny and her traveling
companion walk through empty streets. In Cincinnati, Barnum discovers a
waiting crowd is aware of Barnum's trick of disguising Caroline as Jenny.
Walking through the crowd with Jenny in tow this time, the crowd begins to
taunt Barnum, yelling, "That won't do, old Barnum! You may fool the New
Orleans folks, but you can't come it over the 'Buckeyes,'" and allow Barnum
and Jenny to pass through (338).

In addition to telling us about Barnum's playfulness with cases of
mistaken identity (and also showing himself off as a popular man of the
people) these scenes nicely contrast with the more problematic cases of
mistaken identity in post-Revolutionary literary discourse, revealing the
general acceptance of the theatrical self in nineteenth-century society. Jenny-

Lind-o-mania (which will be discussed at length below) is representative of an

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emerging cult of (pliant) personality in a developing nineteenth-century

popular culture.

These anecdotes of mistaken identity that Barnum merrily draws our
attention to throughout his Life are merely spontaneous and haphazard
isolated incidents. But, for Barnum's purpose, these incidents are rhetorical
devices that help to normalize the more calculated scenes of mistaken
identity that he exhibited on the public stage. Barnum's professional career-
his exhibitions and displays of human aberrations and wonders of the natural
world (The Fejee Mermaid, the Woolly Horse, etc.) were almost entirely based
on mistaken identities and stylized presentations of a public self. His first
public "exhibit," Joice Heth, the alleged 161 year-old slave woman who was
George Washington's nursemaid, is a prototypical event that looks forward to
the Jenny Lind "enterprise" of 1850. Another less memorable, yet fairly
typical Barnumesque exhibit grounded in this notion of mistaken identity is
the Swiss Bell ringers who, before they were picked up by Barnum, called
themselves the "Lancashire Bell Ringers." These Englishmen were miffed
when Barnum stipulated that in order for him to bring them on tour in
America they would have to grow their mustaches, "assume a picturesque
dress," and change their name. Protesting, the Englishmen declared their
inability to speak German and hence, "pass muster as Swiss people." Barnum,
with his keen sense of duplicity and the parochial American mind, counters
their protests by explaining that "if they continued to speak in America as
they had just spoken to me, they might safely claim to be Swiss, or any thing
else, and no one would be any wiser" (344). Other examples abound; indeed,
Barnum's professional life as a showman was contingent on his ability to

manipulate private identity for public consumption.11

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In the emerging market economy of antebellum America, the creation and

manipulation of self was imperative to success. Closing his autobiography
with a section, "Rules for Success in Business," the showman encourages
fortune hunters and speculators to "put on the appearance of business and
the reality will follow" (396). For Couser, Barnum's book is a dark derivation
of Franklin's autobiography and suggests the potentially subversive
possibilities in the American republic: "Barnum's Life was not at all what
Benjamin Vaughan had in mind as the proper offspring of Franklin's
seminal American autobiography. Indeed, it exposes a link between
Founding Father and the nineteenth-century confidence man that we are not
eager to acknowledge" (53). Yet, based on a quick survey of the public
reception of Life (and the subsequent editions), Barnum's book, while it had
its detractors,12 was held up by many nineteenth-century Americans as a
model of American virtue, piety, and ingenuity. As the reviews suggest,
Barnum's book did the kind of cultural work that confirmed the values of a
mid nineteenth-century market economy as it spread across space and time.
Read as a handbook for survival in a burgeoning market economy, the text,
which surreptitiously expostulated and celebrated dynamic selfhood as it
exhibited its central figure, established the necessity of theatrical selfhood in a
socially and economically turbulent time period.

"To Barnum's admirers," explains Neil Harris, "his autobiography was
simply a road map of the route to success" (Humpug 224), and in his
introductory essay to a blue-penciled version of Barnum's autobiography,
George Bryan declares, "In his own day, the 'practical' value of the
autobiography was stressed" (xxx). John Fitch,13 a contemporary of Barnum,

told the showman:

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I know every line in your book; so, indeed, do several members of my

family and I have conducted my business on the principles laid down
in your published 'Rules for Money-Making.‘ I find them correct
principles; and, sir I have sought this interview in order to thank you
for publishing your autobiography, and to tell you that to act of yours I
attribute my present position in life. (quoted in Bryan xxv).14
Harris reports an American lecturer who expostulated that he knew "of no
book which is better adapted to become a thoroughly instructive and
agreeable guide through life" (224), and Bryan reprints advertisements for
$_truggles_and_'[riumphs declaring "Every young man should read it."
Furthermore, that other instructor of young men, Horace Greeley, explained
(this is according to Barnum) that the book and the lecture on the Art of
Money-Getting "was worth a hundred-dollar greenback to a beginner life"
(quoted in Bryan xxi). Barnum's most recent biographer, A.S. Saxon, notes
that Barnum boasted (in an unpublished letter dated 13 March 1855) that his
publisher had received over one thousand auspicious reviews of Life since its
publication in December of the preceding year. Saxon reprints a "fair
example" of one of the one-thousand-plus favorable reviews:
THE MORAL OF BARNUM'S BOOK. If this book be not superficially
read, it is easy to see that, under a cloak of fun, jokes and good humor,
the author intends to teach and press home the lesson that mere
humbugs and deceptions generally fail, and that money acquired in
immoral occupations takes to itself wings and flies away, while
permanent wealth is only to be obtained and enjoyed from sources of
real merit and substantial worth. Thus he shows . . . his "humbugs"
were no source of direct profit to him, but were used merely as

advertisements, to attract public attention to himself, and to gain public

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support for his real and substantial exhibitions, such as his Museum,

Tom Thumb in England, and Jenny Lind. (12, emphasis in original)

In his encouragement of the reader to take Barnum's book seriously and
engage it on a deeper level of meaning (a level similar, perhaps, to the way
nineteenth-century readers would have been encouraged to read the Bible),
the writer of this article suggests the comfort that American culture, by 1855,
had with individuals engaging in plots of mistaken identity and games of
duplicity ("cloak"s of good fun), arguing that the public hoaxes were all for
the "greater good" of Barnum's "real" and "substantial" (could this be thick
irony?) public displays.

The relationship between the self-stylized, dynamic self of Barnum's
autobiography and the book's status as a handbook for success in the raid-
nineteenth century suggests how Americans recast the problem of selfliood at
mid-century. Barnum's book was consumed and produced during a period of
the American experience when, Russel Nye explains, "the control of the
means of cultural production and transmission [had finally and decidedly]
passed from a previously privileged elite to the urbanized, democratized
middle classes" (IheJlnembarrassedMuse 2). The emergence of a bona fide
mass culture operating through the market mechanisms of a burgeoning
capitalist system created a space for Barnum's book to do the kind of cultural

work that it accomplished.

Stylization of Other and an Antebellum Culture of Exhibition
The theatricality of Barnum's public life does not simply stop with his self.
Barnum managed to stylize his own life in his autobiography, but the

autobiography is primarily made up of accounts of Barnum's peculiarities in

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the theatricality of the Other. Indeed, Barnum made a name for himself by

stylizing the lives of Others and packaging them for public consumption.

It is no coincidence that in 1834 Barnum moved his wife and child to New
York City in order to fulfill a dream of owning a public exhibition: "1 had long
fancied that I could succeed if I could only get hold of a public exhibition (143).
The nineteenth-century culture of exhibition was wide and varied, involving
the public display of natural curiosities, technological advances and
demonstrations, and medical/ psychological treatments. Mesmerism,
phrenology, animal magnetism, the daguerreotype and other cultural
phenomenon were displayed on the exhibition stage of nineteenth-century
America. In addition, the public lectures and lyceums15 that became popular
during the 18305 and the grand revival traditions16 of the same decade also
contributed to the larger exhibition culture of the period. Barnum
participated in and used all of these aspects of the culture of exhibition in his
career--he gave lectures (his most famous was entitled "The Philosophy of
Humbug"), exhibited mesmerized subjects in his "Lecture Room" and even
addressed congregations of America's churches. His most intense (and
profitable) experience with the exhibition culture, however, was through the
public display of human aberrations.

In her discussion of the development of Dime Museums, Brooks
McNamara has noted that before the Revolution traveling showmen roamed
the colonies exhibiting natural curiosities for profit (218). By 1835, when
Barnum exhibited his first human before the public gaze, the exhibition had
become an integral, and curious, part of an emerging urban American
popular culture. By 1850, as we will see in Barnum's orchestration of the
Jenny Lind American tour, "exhibiting" had become a formalized

extravaganza yielding high profits and intense public fervor. Barnum was

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working in a tradition of public exhibition and we might pause to adumbrate

the development of the tradition from the post-Revolutionary period to the
mid-nineteenth century.

Barnum's most famous predecessor in the area of public exhibitions was
Charles Willson Peale, the eccentric developer of America's first museum of
indigenous artifacts and natural history. Peale's museum, which he opened
in Philadelphia in 1784 and passionately developed until he retired in 1810,
was a product of an Enlightened mind that believed in the essential
perfection of the natural order. For Peale, humans that copied and learned
from Nature led happy, righteous lives: "I love the study of Nature," he once
said, "for it teacheth benevolence." Peale exhibited Nature in order to teach
and instruct; the following was inscribed over the entranceway of the
museum:

The Book of Nature open,

. . . Explore the wondrous work,

. . . an Institute

Of Laws eternal, whose unaltered page

No time can change, no copier corrupt. (quoted in Sellers 15)
Christopher Looby has argued that the immediate post-Revolutionary leaders
(like Peale) looked at the world around them and were fearful of the chaos
and the turbulence of the new republic. Realizing that the immediate post-
Revolutionary society was a "factitious entity, a concocted political framework
that gathered together people whose primordial loyalties were attached to
local, ethnic, sectarian, and linguistical communities. . . . [i]t occurred to [the
leaders] that nature might aid them in constituting the nation" (Looby 255).
The mission of Peale's museum, then, was to rationalize and justify the new

(artificial) social hierarchies and orderings according to what they saw as the

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universal truth and order of nature: "In the thought of cultural leaders of the

early national period, there is a kind of automatic metaphorical exchange
between images of natural order and ideas of social and political order"
(Looby 253).

Consider Peale's "The Artist in his Museum": In his self-portrait of 1822,
the benign and unassuming Peale stands in the foreground of the painting,
pulling back a regal—looking curtain and beckoning the viewer to enter his
most democratic of public spaces.17 From archaeological artifacts to stuffed
birds to the portraits of the new country's political leaders, the museum
houses the stuff of America. Furthermore, the museum is organized in a
manner befitting a culture based on the principles of enlightened rationalism
and a concern for hierarchies. From the floor to the ceiling, the artifacts are
displayed in taxonomical order: The spectator needs to direct his gaze
downward in order to ponder the lower orders of animals, but in order to
delight in the visages of George Washington and John Adams the visitor is
required to tilt his or her head backward and gaze up toward the ceiling.
Images of blacks, women, Native Americans, or any Others do not grace the
top layer of Peale's pictorial display.

After Peale retired, he gave the museum management to his sons,
Rembrant and Reubens, post-Enlightenment subjects who found it
impossible to maintain the didactic mission of the museum. The exhibition
of Nature gradually gave way to public demand for fantastic and exotic
displays and performances. Gradually, the function of the museum moved
from an institution benefiting the public good to a money-making device as
Reubens, late in the first decade of the nineteenth century, began to use
lecturers, performers, and experimenters to attract more customers.18 By

1817, Reubens conceded that the museum could only survive on a profit

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motive and, to keep pace, he added catchpenny shows and a pandean band (a

one-man musical show). By 1838, three years prior to the opening of
Barnum's American Museum, Peale's museum was displaying Negro bands,
Yankee impersonators, Hungarian minstrels and musical ladies. Tom Thumb
appeared on the Museum stage in 1845. The museum stayed on this course
until Barnum finally purchased it in 1850.

The exhibition culture of the 18305 through the 18505 was fueled by the
demands of an emerging, culturally complex, and diverse American city. As
more Americans began to call the city their home, a new urban culture of
heterogeneity and differences evolved. "In an atmosphere of expanding
personal freedom and individual opportunity, nineteenth-century cities
severed the old ties of men and women with the countryside, setting them
adrift in a maelstrom of people radically different from themselves" (Barth 3).
The variety of residential housing areas, sartorial significations, and verbal
speech patterns all demonstrated that the emerging American city was a place
of contrasts that highlighted ethnic, racial, and socio-economic differences.
And the radical differences that separated city people also became a form of
popular fascination and speculation.

Barnum seized on the opportunities of marketing and advertising afforded
by the developing "metropolitan press" of the period. During the 18305, the
urban newspaper gradually became a common source of public information
and knowledge: "The metropolitan press pioneered journalistic practices that
satisfied people's need for information about the bewildering place they
found themselves in, the other inhabitants, and themselves" (Barth 59). The
modern newspaper was a representational tool that made sense of the baffling
signs of the city, reporting on public events and even, as Barth argues,

providing urban residents with a way to define themselves in the face of

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their neighbors (62). Yet, newspapers were profit-motivated enterprises and

relied on the representation of sensational and fantastic stories to hold their
reader's attention and keep them buying the papers. "The least that can be
said is that the antebellum public was fed an increasingly spicy diet of horror,
gore, and perversity in both the penny papers and in the closely allied genres
of trial pamphlets and criminal biographies" (Reynolds 171). "The roots of
sensationalism," argues Barth, "lay not merely in the human craving for
thrills, but in the nature of the modern city itself" (65). In its expansive size
and diverse ethnic and cultural offerings, the modern city was a place of
wonder and mysteries where concealment and disguises were a part of city
life. Urban newspapers, in turn, served its residents as both agents of
revelation of the mysteries of the city and mystification devices. Public
controversy sold papers and the editors of the nineteenth century
metropolitan press were not above fabricating stories in order to foment
public interest. "By the 18505," argues David Reynolds, "the penny papers had
long held undisputed dominance of the mass newspaper market, the public
was so accustomed to sensational news that a feeling of glut had set in" (175).

By the 18305, a fascination with the spectacular and bizarre was rivaling the
interest in and the study of Nature in the popular mind. There is perhaps no
period of the American experience that demonstrated the interest in "freaks"
and human aberrations with the avidity and fascination of Americans in the
18305 through the 18505. The exhibition culture that Barnum participated in
and helped foment was based on differences between the spectators and the
human displays. Differences of race, gender, and the human form excited and
mystified nineteenth-century audiences.

"Freak shows," or the public display of difference and the self-stylization of

the Other, were an informal and unorganized, yet popular, cultural context of

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the early nineteenth century. By mid-century, explains Robert Bogden,

"'human curiosities' who, up to then traveled and were exhibited
independently, were joining burgeoning amusement organizations" (537).
The exhibitions highlighted exotic contrasts with "civilization"; Bogden
observes that favorite themes included "cannibalism, human sacrifice, head
hunting, polygamy, unusual dress, and food preferences which were
disgusting to Americans" (540). Contance Rourke explains the flair for the
grotesque in antebellum exhibition culture, noting that by 1841 "[a] passion
for the morbidity strange, perhaps always languidly sleeping in the human
mind, suddenly had become devouring" (291). Rourke mentions the
publication of Poe's Iales_of_the_Grotesque_and_theArabesque in 1840, arguing
that
[F]reaks and monsters of all kinds were a fashion. . . . Aberrations from
the normal in anatomical specimens were shown everywhere, with
teeth and bones or even more gruesome relics which evoked the
scenes of Indian slaughter, or the hint of monstrous heathen rites.19
(291)
Barnum made his reputation and his fortune through the public display of
human aberrations and the autocratic stylization of the Other. By the mid-
18405, Barnum's American Museum was in full swing, attracting audiences
who were able to view freaks of all sorts. From the Bearded Lady to the
"Nova Scotia Giantess," from the Leopard-skinned boy to Zalumma Agra, the
famous "Circassian Girl," and from the Chinese family to the Albino family-
if they were deformed, exotic, disproportioned in any way, or simply inclined
to be transformed into one of Barnum's freaks (he exhibited a "Yankee Man"
at one point) the great showman would put them on the stage of his "Lecture

Room" for the inspection of the masses.20

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The differences between the exhibit and the spectators, however, were

generally more ostensible than real; that is, the "freaks" were misrepresented
and stylized according to popular stereotypes of specific races and
nationalities. The exploitation of human strangeness was a theatrical
performance grounded in the disguise of the Other. Blacks acted out
aboriginal roles, often being represented as "missing links"; Native
Americans performed rituals and dances that confirmed their primordial
type; and Gypsies and Bohemians (usually women) were represented as lusty,
exotic beauties.
Dressed in a manner compatible with the story, the exhibit would
behave consistently with the front. "Wildmen" or "savages" might
chant or scream while strutting about the stage snarling and growling.
Dress might include animal skins, string of bones around the neck, and
chains allegedly protecting the audience from the beast before them. In
the case of people from the Orient, the presentation and the
performance would be characteristically more sedate with the 'freak"
acting out in exaggerated stereotypic ways the mannerisms and
customs of the countries they represented. (Bogden 540)

The primary function of the displays was to make money, despite the fact
that the "freak shows" were advertised as "educational or scientific exhibits,"
and not merely "frivolous entertainment" (Bogden 538). But while the
managers used the human aberrations for their use value, the spectators
found something quite different in the context of the "freak shows." Harris's
assessment of the public reception of Tom Thumb (Barnum's popular midget
who made a big hit in America as well as England, even impressing Queen

Victoria with his prepossessing and precocious performance) seems quite

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naive when he argues that Tom Thumb appealed to the perpetual boy or girl

in each of his adult spectators:
He was the furthest thing possible from a monster. Pert, intelligible,
able to mimic, sing, and dance, General Tom Thumb . . . would become
the perfect man-child, the perpetual boy, appealing to all ages and
conditions. Crowds identified with him, rather than against him. (49)
Bogden, perhaps because he is writing fifteen years after Harris, is tougher
with his assessment of the "freak shows," declaring the exhibitions "steeped
in racism, imperialism and handicapism" and emphasizing the "inferiority of

the 'human curiosity. Moreover, Bogden passes over arguments that the
"freak shows" provided the human aberrations with a venue to make a
living and even prosper by arguing that the shows were distortions of reality
and antidemocratic: . . the mere presence of the exhibits on stage and as part
of the amusement world, a world which became tainted in the public view,
suggested that they belonged with their own kind, and that they were not
competent enough to prosper in the larger world" (547).

The truly astonishing dynamic about the emergence of freak shows, which
is lost on Bogden, is the fact that as the freak shows were entertaining the
urban masses, criminal penitentiaries and insane asylums--institutional
homes for humans with "aberrational" tendencies--were becoming an
integral part of the American reform culture. America was the site of the
world's first penitentiary system; the French government sent Toqueville to
America in 1832 to observe the new penitentiary system. Prior to the rise of
the asylum the poor and the insane were assimilated into the community.
By the 18305, a Lockean way of viewing human behavior (the blank slate

theory) demonstrated that society itself was corrupt and a burgeoning reform

tradition gradually developed the idea that criminals and the insane could be

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reformed of their problems by removing them from the social (dis)order. The

implication was that separation from the social milieu and a good dose of
moral reform would rejuvenate rational behavior.21 It is interesting that as
the reformers of the period were carting the aberrants away and sequestering
them behind institutional walls, showman like Barnum were parading
"defective" individuals before the wondering and paying public gaze. Of
course, Barnum did not search out his "freaks" from neighboring asylums or
penitentiaries. An important distinction needs to be made between Barnum's
freaks and the institutionally committed individuals. Yet, the irony of a
society that has made room for human aberrations in the forum of a culture
of exhibition and, at the same time, demanded the removal of social pariahs,
illustrates one of the paradoxes of the tension-filled nineteenth century.

The exhibition of self and Other in antebellum America was a site of
cultural exchange and conflict. The freaks, dwarfs, and Divas that were
displayed to the public gaze in antebellum America, both confirmed and
implicitly challenged middle class values. While it has become fashionable to
create a dialectical model of culture where the hegemony corrals all forms of
cultural discourse into dominant epistemes,22 recent cultural studies such as
Eric Lott's Loyeandjheft have argued that culture is an arena of negotiation
and exchange between dominant and peripheral discourses.23 As a site of
cultural exchange and pleasure, nineteenth-century exhibition culture
becomes a sphere in which hegemonic and peripheral voices mix and
mingle, precluding the type of cultural domination of the hegemony that is
implicit within the critical work of consensus / Marxist schools. The public
exhibition textualizes self and Other, and consequently highlights the
subjectivity of the exhibit in the creation of public meaning. The exhibition

culture was bound up in the dynamic circumstances that occurred when a self

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was projected out toward the public sphere. On one level, the selves that

were exhibited to nineteenth century Americans were used as ideological
mirrors that reflected the values and epistemologies of the dominant order.
We have discussed this in terms of Barnum's book and the cultural work it
did, and discussions to follow on Joice Heth and Jenny Lind will continue this
idea. On another level, however, the reflecting mirrors were distorted—like
the fun house mirrors at a carnival. As authors of their own personas, the
self that is on display performs a drama and consequently thwarts the
homologous correspondence between the audience's desires and perceptions.
The exhibition of self and Other was performed in a cultural sphere where
meaning was created somewhere between the ideological demands of the
audience to see their own selves through the public display of Other and the
public presentation of self that the private self was projecting into the cultural
playing field. Exhibition demands interpretation of the public self that has
been displayed before the public gaze, and with interpretation, the individual
authors of self remit their authorial authority and concede the fact that
meaning occurs somewhere between the stylized public personas and the
public interpretation of the exhibitees.

The Russian formalist M.M. Bakhtin may be helpful here. For Bakhtin, the
dialogical discourse of the novel precluded a strictly hegemonic domination
of cultural space and language. We might think about Bakhtin's discussion
of the novel in terms of the textualization of self in the exhibition culture of
the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Defining the novel as a
diversity of social speech types and individual voices, all artistically
organized, Bakhtin relished novelistic discourse for its uncanny ability to
express cultural tensions and ideologies. The novel for Bakhtin is made up of

a multitude of social voices that refract off of each other and compete for

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distinction. The chaotic, incalculable effect of a word (or language) precludes

homologic correspondence between the author's intentions and the reader's
interpretation, and meaning occurs somewhere within the kaleidoscope of
language that makes up a literary text. Language is neither owned nor
controlled by a specific class, race, or gender, "words and forms can belong to
no one . . . language has been completely taken over, shot through with
intentions and accents" (Dialogicaleagination 283). Each sign or gesture of
culture means and is interpreted within a specific cultural context, yet each
sign is "open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an
obscuring mist" (DialogicaLJmagination 276). In the semiotics of culture,
gestures and language are "shot through with shared thoughts, points of
view, alien value judgments and accents"—nothing exists in itself; everything
means and works within a specific cultural context (DialogicaLLmagination
276).

Consider Barnum's initial foray into the exhibition culture of antebellum
America. In 1835, the "Prince of Humbugs" began his career as a showman by
becoming a slaveholder. Keen on the public demand for the exhibition of
race and difference on the public stage, Barnum made every possible effort to
supply the public need.24 He purchased Joice Heth, the alleged 161 year old
woman who was displayed before the public as George Washington's
nursemaid, from R.W. Lindsay in June of 1835 and began to "exhibit" her at
Niblo's in New York City in August. Barnum only enjoyed Heth's services
for 7 months; she died on 19 February 1836. A public autopsy revealed Joice's
age to be no more than 80 years and Barnum came under public suspicion for
his blatant humbuggery. Barnum managed to make Joice Heth the subject of
public controversy and to profit considerably from her exhibitions. Indeed,
Joice Heth becomes the first of a multitude of Others that Barnum exhibited

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and stylized for public consumption. However, Joice Heth was as much the

author of her self as Barnum was the creator of her character and it is the
dynamics between Barnum's manipulation of the Other and Joice's
presentation of her self, all embedded in the culture of exhibition, that makes
this incident important here.

Shortly before he purchased Joice Heth, Barnum visited Scudder's
Museum (which he would purchase 6 years later) to bargain on the purchase
of a Hydro-Oxygen Microscope that the owner guaranteed would "secure its
owner an independence" if the invention were exhibited throughout the
country (144). The two thousand dollar price tag (1000 down and the balance
on credit) was more than Barnum was willing or able to pay, though. Shortly
thereafter Barnum discovered Joice Heth and does not seem to have had
much trouble talking Lindsay down from the $3000 asking price to $1000. It
was more profitable in antebellum America to exhibit fantastic African
Americans than it was to offer close-up glimpses of nature through a
microscope. On a pragmatic level, Barnum certainly made the right choice in
choosing Joice over the microscope. The fantastic claim of her age and the
mythical connection to Washington was ripe for the spectacular imagination
of the 18305.

According to Barnum's description, Joice was a wonder to look at: He says
he was "favorably struck with the appearance of the old woman" who "might
almost . . . have been called a thousand years old any other age (148).
Toothless, blind, and nearly completely paralyzed, Joice's eyes "were so deeply
sunken in their sockets that the eyeballs seemed to have disappeared
altogether." Her decrepit hand was bent inward and the fingernails went

beyond her wrist. Rounding out the picture, Barnum tells us, "The nails

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upon her large toes also had grown to the thickness of nearly a quarter of an

inch" (148-149).

Joice mixed her grotesque features with a fine sense of histrionics when
she passed herself off as George Washington's nursemaid: She was "sociable"
and talked "incessantly" to her public viewers. Joice performed on her own
volition; unlike Tom Thumb, her successor in the world of Barnum's
exhibitions, she did not rely on Barnum for any prompting or training. She
sang hymns, spoke of the first President as "clear little George," and proudly
claimed to be present at his birth. "'In fact,‘ said Joice, and it was a favorite
expression of hers, 'I raised him!" Appealing to the piety of her viewers, Joice
moved from anecdotes of Washington's childhood to religious subjects, "for
she claimed to be a member of the Baptist Church," which "rendered her
exhibition an extremely interesting one" (149).

We might pause to consider the implications of the alleged nursemaid of
Washington stirring public interest and being profitably exhibited in the
public sphere. The irony, of course, is that Barnum secured his own
independence through the enslavement of another-he made $1500 a week
exhibiting Joice Heth at Niblo's and then he took her on a profitable tour of
the Eastern states. Barnum's campaign to "sell" Joice Heth to the public was a
curious example of the theatricality of Otherness that Barnum perfected
throughout his career. Moreover, the incident demonstrates how the
exhibition of black culture in the nineteenth century, particularly Barnum's
exhibition of black culture, was based in the commodification and reification
of the Other. "While the slaves are certainly playing in for some control, it is
clear that black culture was frankly on display in the North as well as the
South, and that such display adhered to a commodified logic whose roots
inevitably lay in slavery . . ." (Lott 43).

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Certainly the appeal of the Washington legend attracted interest in the

post-heroic period of the republic-the Founding Fathers had all passed away,
but Washington's nursemaid was alive and well. Barnum's exhibition of
Joice, of course, cuts across the major social and economic tensions of
antebellum America: In 1835, a period of increasing sectional tension over the
issue of slavery (recall the Nullification Crisis of 1832), Barnum buys and
exhibits an old slave woman, exhibiting her to the public as the first person to
put clothes on the Father of the country and implicitly underscoring the
embarrassing reality of slavery in a society based on principles of freedom and
equality.

Barnum's success in the theatricalizaton of Other was primarily accounted
for in his manipulation of the press and, consequently, the public mind.
Barnum was not the first to exhibit Joice Heth, and her "success" as a public
display was a result of her own sense of histrionics combined with Barnum's
cagey marketing of the Other. Lindsay was exhibiting Joice before he sold her
to Barnum and though we don't know how he fared, he did, after all, sell her
for $2000 less than what he originally asked. After the purchase, Barnum set
off "to make the necessary arrangements for her reception in New York"
(152). In the 1869 edition of the autobiography, Barnum would add, "At the
outset of my career I saw that everything depended upon getting people to
think, and talk, and become1 curious and excited over and about the 'rare
spectacle'" (83). An exhibition space at Niblo's was secured and two foot by
three foot transparencies announcing, "Joice Heth-161 years old" were placed
outside. Advertisements announcing Joice as "The greatest curiosity in the
world" ran in the New York newspapers. His cagey sidekick, Levi Lyman
(who would later disguise himself as the learned Dr. Griffin and lead the

infamous Fejee Mermaid up the East Coast, marshaling excitement and

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public fervor over the alleged exotic artifact), wrote a pamphlet of Joice's life

(fictionalizing a fiction), placed a sketch of the Negro woman on the top, and
sold it to the public for 6 cents. When public interest waned, Barnum
drummed up public controversy and, consequently, more business, when he
sent pseudonymous editorials to the New York papers declaring that Joice
Heth was an automaton made up of India rubber and whale bones.

Of course the enormous irony of the career of America's most famous
showman being founded upon the shackles of African American slavery is
nothing new in our understanding of antebellum America. Yet Joice Heth,
ultimately, had the last laugh on P.T. Barnum. Throughout his career,
Barnum submitted that he was astonished when the physicians who
examined her corpse discovered that Joice was no more than 80 years old. It is
important that Barnum maintains his innocence in this alleged humbug. In
his Life, he willingly reveals previous public deceptions. For instance, he
happily unmasks, or "confesses," his participation in the Great Buffalo Hunt
in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1843 and the Woolly Horse episode of 1848.25 Of
course Barnum had a great deal to lose by admitting the willful duplicity of
the Heth affair. In addition, as any reader of the autobiography can see,
Barnum was not averse to uncovering former deceptions; indeed, he reminds
us in the Preface to Life:

None of my enterprises, however, have been omitted, and though a
portion of my "confessions" may by some be considered injudicious, I
prefer frankly to "acknowledge the corn" wherever I have had a hand
in plucking it. (iv)
Yet, by maintaining his ignorance of Joice Heth's age, he admits that he has
been duped by the histrionics of the cagey old woman. In his Life, Barnum
was still asserting his innocence in the Heth hoax, arguing that he bought

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Joice from Lindsay in "perfectgoodjm’th," and that he was duped by a "forged
bill_of_sale purporting to have been made by the father of George
Washington." Barnum argues that he "honestly belieyed" the false document
and laments the fact that he "has ever since borne the stigma of originating
that imposture" (MW italics in original). It
probably hurt Barnum more to admit his unwitting role in the falsification of
Joice Heth's character because, by doing so, he was admitting that Joice Heth
duped him. The actor with the most crafty sense of Showmanship in the Joice
Heth affair was not Lindsay, or even Barnum, but Joice Heth, and critical
commentaries regarding this episode have ignored this important dynamic.
Throughout the autobiography, Barnum goes to painstaking lengths to prove
to the reader that no one can outsmart him, yet Joice Heth out-theatricalizes
"The Prince of Humbugs" at the start of his illustrious career.26 Joice Heth
performed her role so well that it was only death that could uncover her
mask of deception.27

InLoye_and_Iheft, Eric Lott's recent book on the rninstrel tradition in
American culture, issues of race and theatricality of antebellum America are
broached, providing an important background for understanding Barnum's
Life With Joice Heth, Barnum exploited the Other as an integral part of the
national past, but in the following episode, the great showman actually
became that Other in order to receive the dividends of his investment in
black culture. Of course Barnum was colorblind when it came to exhibiting
human aberrations on the public stage. White, brown, black, or red; man,
woman, or child--Barnum was satisfied if he could profitably present
any"body" into the public sphere. However, as we saw in the Joice Heth
episode, the "bodies" that Barnum exhibited were not selfless and will-less

mannequins, and it is their assertion of self as it conflicts with Barnum's

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presentation and the consequential perceptions of the public spectators that

makes Barnum's participation in the exhibition culture interesting.

There is an important moment in Barnum's Life that illustrates this idea
of the theatricalizaiton of Other. Barnum joined a traveling circus under the
direction of Aaron Turner in April of 1836. A minstrel singer (a white man
who blacked his face and sang black folk songs) named Sanford was under the
employ of the circus, but on a jaunt through South Carolina, Sanford
"abruptly" flew the company (189).28 Barnum was left with a problem. He
had advertised a minstrel show and was "determined not to disappoint the
audience" (189). However, since there was no one in the company willing to
perform the minstrel act, Barnum tells us that he assumed Sanford's role,
blacked his face, and stepped onto the stage that evening to participate in a
nineteenth-century cultural practice that struck at the heart of race, class, and
gender relations in antebellum America.

The passage (quoted in its entirety below), ripe with the ideological
language of race, demands a certain amount of cultural decoding. Emerging
in the early 18305, the minstrel tradition was at its height from 1846 to 1854,
and is still evidenced in the practices of American popular culture. The
critical response to the minstrel tradition has exposed the phenomena as a
racist attempt by white culture to mock and lampoon black culture, and so it
was. Yet, Lott uncovers the cultural complexity of the tradition, explaining it
as the first white recognition of black culture and a phenomena that "worked
for over a hundred years to facilitate safely an exchange of energies between
two otherwise rigidly bounded and policed cultures. . ." (Lott 6). Given the
subjected position of African Americans, the minstrel tradition was precluded
from becoming a middle ground of cultural exchange. The "exchanges" of the

minstrel tradition were more evident in the commodified relationship

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between the black-white man (the minstrel singer) and his (mostly) white

audience. The minstrel tradition effectively commodified "blackness"--in
their appropriation of black culture, whites "invested" (by studying and
expropriating black culture) and then in turn "sold" blackness to the white
public. Lott describes the minstrel tradition as a performative aspect of white
culture that, in its appropriation and co-option of black culture, expressed
racial ambivalence that whites harbored for blacks: guilt over slavery and fear
of the black man as a formidable sexual force were obvious racial confusions
being worked out in the minstrel tradition. Finally, the minstrel tradition
worked as a control mechanism over the black body; the stylized
implementation of a black mask over a white face, and the racial confusion
that resulted in audiences actually thinking they were hearing Negroes
singing "maintain[ed] some symbolic control" over the black body by allowing
white culture to puppeteer the black body into ideological submission. Lott's
study is essential for an understanding of what, exactly, was at stake that fall
evening in 1836 when Barnum blacked his face. By using Lott as a cultural
explicator, we can examine Barnum's rhetoric and discuss the implications of
his theatricalizaiton of self and Other. In the midst of his anecdotal narrative
about life as an itinerant showman in the mid 18305, the following passage
appears in Life:
At Camden, S.C., Sanford abruptly left me. I had advertised Negro
songs; no one of my company was competent to fill his place; but being
determined not to disappoint the audience, Lblacked_myself
thoroughly, and sung the songs advertised, namely, "Zip Coon,"
"Gittin up Stairs," and "The Raccoon Hunt, or Sitting on a Rail." It was

decidedly "a hard push," but the audience supposed the singer was

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Sanford, and, to my surprise, my singing was applauded, and in two of

the songs I was encored! (189 emphasis in original)
Recalling the account nearly twenty years after the incident, Barnum is still
surprised and merry over his success. For as much of a showman as Barnum
was, he rarely occupied a stage in a costume other than his own self. Barnum
orchestrated his own life and the lives of others, but his stage was the stage of
the world. It is curious, then, that when Barnum does assume another
character it is done by blacking his face and improvising a minstrel act.
(Furthermore, his rationalization for blacking up—no one in the company
"competent" enough to perform and his unwillingness to disappoint the
audience--seems disingenuous. It seems obvious that Barnum simply
delighted in the prospect of the performance.) Barnum's comment about the
"competence" required in rninstrelsy suggests both the professionalization
and the specialization of the practice. However, we might wonder about what
made Barnum qualified to perform the minstrel routine. The minstrel show,
a highly popular nineteenth-century entertainment, was a black performance
based on a white invention, and as Barnum demonstrates here it was used
"for better or worse" as a "product of self-commodification" (Lott 39). Here,
Barnum reaps the rewards of reification through his "investment" in black
culture. Mimicry required study and observation, and the minstrel singers
who confused the empirical boundaries between black and white entered into
black culture in order to present it (in a highly artificial, distorted manner) to
their white audiences were engaging in some form of cultural exchange.
Barnum uses his minstrel performance to introduce a commentary on
slavery and Southern rule:
One of my musicians, a Scotchman named Cochran, was arrested in

Camden, for having said to the colored barber who was shaving him,

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that he ought to escape to the Free States or Canada. I made strong but

vain efforts for his release. He was imprisoned over six months. (189)
The passage is ambiguous on the subject of why Barnum set out to free his
musician. Were his efforts to release Cochran based on political principle or
mere self interest? Of course he was "interested" in Cochran as a musician in
his troupe, but the very mention of the anecdote and the suggestion of
authoritarian and anti-democratic Southern rule aligns Barnum against
slavery and the political institutions that confirm its practice. The ideal
reader response to this passage is a distaste for any state which precludes free
speech and imprisons detractors from its system of belief. Finally, Barnum
winds up this brief foray into nineteenth century issues of race with another
anecdote:

After singing my negro [sic] songs one evening, and just as I had pulled

my coat off in the "dressing room" of the tent, I heard a slight

disturbance outside the canvas. Rushing to the spot, and finding a

person disputing with my men, I took their part, and spoke my mind

to him very freely (189).
Barnum did not simply fill in for Sanford for one night and he makes no
mention of searching for another minstrel singer. Indeed, he had found the
minstrel he was looking for in himself, and the subtle reference to continuing
performances ("After singing my negro songs one evening") is intriguing;
Barnum has performed the songs on a number of occasions, and, moreover,
he has made them his; that is, he has taken stock in his "negro songs" and
made a repertoire from them. In the preceding passage, Barnum never tells
us what the disturbance was about and, indeed, when he emerged from the
tent disguised as a black man and began haranguing the stranger, a new

problem quickly arose:

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He instantly drew his pistol, exclaiming, "You Black scoundrel! dare

you use such language to a white man?" and proceeded deliberately to
cock it. I saw that he supposed me to be a negro [sic], and might
perhaps blow my brains out. Quick as thought I rolled up my shirt
sleeves, and replied, "I am as white as you are, sir." He absolutely
dropped the pistol with fright! (189)
The psycho-sexual overtones of this passage (the gun as phallus, and the
imagery associated with the man "deliberately" "cock"ing his pistol) are
examples of the white male's latent fear of miscegenation and the homoerotic
fascination of the black body that Leslie Fiedler first noticed in 1948.29 Lott
has picked up on these inclinations as they reveal themselves in the accounts
and lyrics of the minstrel tradition, observing, "In accounts like this we read a
relatively transparent white male attraction to and repulsion from the black
penis, for which the preoccupation with miscegenation serves as a kind of
shorthand" (57).:30 Moreover, this incident is of interest to us for the way it
demonstrates the lack of control Barnum (or anyone who "blacked up") had
over the role they were performing. Whites mistook the minstrel singers for
"real" African Americans. Lott remarks, . . when, in the decades before the
civil War, northern white men "blacked up"" and imitated what they
supposed was black dialect, music, and dance, some people, without derision,
heard Negroes singing" (17). Barnum's anecdote demonstrates that this racial
conflation occurred off the stage as easily as it did under the footlights.
Furthermore, we might wonder about Barnum's decision to use the word
"fright" in describing the man's reaction upon learning Barnum was white.
Was the fear the result of the glaring possibilities of the flexible and

transformative nature of race? Was the man miffed by the theatrical

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presentation of race and consequently threatened by the thought of the

mutability of racial signification?31

It is probably too simplistic to chastise Barnum, as Thomas Couser does, for
"not moralizing on race at this opportune narrative moment," and treating
"it as a contingent phenomenon, allowing the incident to stand as a practical
joke that nearly backfired" (57). Barnum's views on slavery were
characteristic of many Northern Democrats. On one hand he could write the
following to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in April of 1855: "I have spent
months on the cotton plantations of Mississippi, where I have seen more
than one 'Legree'" (Selectedletters 86), yet on the other hand, he could argue
for the continuing enslavement of blacks on the grounds that emancipation
would put them in an inferior position to the whites. It was no accident that
Barnum omitted this incident from the 1869 edition of the autobiography.
Indeed, by 1869, the racial "problems" relating to black slavery in antebellum
America that were lost on Barnum in the 1855 edition are considerably
cleared out of the autobiography. The Joice Heth affair remained a sore spot
for Barnum and he continued to talk about it in the subsequent editions of
his autobiography, but without the aplomb he exhibited in Life. It should
come as no surprise that Barnum excised the blackfacing passages from later
editions and there is another curious incident in Life that is removed from
later versions. In January of 1836, a month before Joice Heth's death, Barnum
traveled to Washington to do a show with his newly-acquired juggler and
acrobat, Antonio Vivalla. Sitting in the gallery of the Senate one day,
Barnum witnessed a vitriolic debate over the question of slavery. Barnum
reports a raging speech by John Calhoun, who had recently spearheaded the
nullification crisis (Barnum does not mention the Crisis, however) that was

beaten down by Andrew Jackson, regarding the nefarious abolitionists and the

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danger they presented to the stability of the social order. Apparently, in 1855

the irony of his position as a one-time and future slaveholding Northerner
sitting in the house of the United States Senate, listening to Calhoun's
diatribe, was lost on his authorial consciousness. A.S. Saxon reports a
disturbing incident regarding the RT. Barnum of antebellum America: In one
account of his life published in the New York Atlas, Barnum records his
purchase of a male slave in Mississippi during the winter of 1837-38. When
he discovered the man had stolen money from him, Barnum gave him 50
lashes and sold him at auction in New Orleans, receiving in turn "cash,
sugar, molasses, and a_negro_woman_and_child" (Quoted in Saxon 84, based
on a story in the Atlas, emphasis in original). The goods were shipped back to
New York and the woman and child sold in St. Louis. Barnum's racism is
inexcusable and his attitudes about African Americans demonstrate that he
was a typical Northerner who was clearly ambivalent about slavery, yet
untroubled and un-selfconscious about many of the problems that his
exhibition of the black body presented.32

Barnum, it is worth stressing, began his life as a political and religious
radical, and throughout his life he maintained a rather cavalier attitude
toward the "status quo." While residing in Connecticut in the late 18205,
Barnum made a name for himself as a Universalist and a vociferous
Jacksonian Democrat. When the local paper refused to print his editorials, he
established a newspaper, IheHfialdeLFreedom, as a tool to fight religious
intolerance and repression. (It is curious, of course, that Barnum's paper
started publication the same year Garrison first published that other herald of
freedom, Ihe_Liberator.)33 He was thrown in jail three times for his
religious beliefs (which, in many ways were indistinguishable from his

political ideology) and in a most (self) celebrated incident, he was jailed for

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sixty days for allegedly libeling a deacon in Danbury, Connecticut.

Furthermore, he expressed interest and sympathy with the women's
movement. His minister at the Bridgeport Universalist church he
sometimes attended was the locally-famous Olympia Brown, a radical
suffragette who became embroiled in vitriolic church politics and was
eventually ousted from the parish.34 He listened to the suffragette, Lucy
Stone, with interest, published a piece about her in his IllustratedMs and
attempted to get her to lecture in Bridgeport, explaining, "I think the lecture
on Woman's Rights would suit them here-at all events, they ought to hear
it" (quoted in Saxon 60). In a letter dated 27 April 1853, Barnum explained to
Dr. Russell Trail that he "was much pleased with Miss Stone's speech last
night and concur with nearly all her views" (W 68). Barnum had
nothing to gain by speaking sympathetically toward the nascent woman's
movement and some of his most ostensibly genuine public statements regard

an expanded social role for women.35

Theatricality of Self and Other within a Culture of Sentiment
While Barnum would continue to exhibit the strange and fantastic, by 1850
he was clearly searching for a way to distance himself from "freak shows" and
public hoaxes and break into the respectable market of sentimental culture.
With its unashamed "confessions," and its dramatic "conversion" to
teetotalism near the end of the narrative, Barnum's book becomes a text that
confirms a sentimental culture. Indeed, although Barnum has not been at
home during his entire narrative, the showman's closing thoughts link him
to the sentimental realm of domesticity:
I am frequently in New-York, and occasionally in other great cities, yet I

am never so happy as when I return to my "homestead." I am writing

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the closing pages of this Autobiography on the sixth anniversary of the

"housewarming"36 and my heart is warm with gratitude. I am at

home, in the bosom of my family; and "home" and "family" are the

highest and most expressive symbols of the kingdom of heaven. (404)
Through a discussion of Barnum's "Lecture Room," the Jenny Lind
American tour of 1850, and the construction of his homestead, Iranistan, in
Bridgeport, Connecticut, I will show how Barnum put sentimental culture on
display, proving that by mid-century, the theatrical and sentimental were
happy bed-fellows and that mid-century Americans were comfortable with
"playing" at being sentimental.

In addition to his autobiography, the reigning passion of Barnum's life
from 1841 until 1868 was his American Museum (destroyed by fire in 1868).
With its strange and curious artifacts (magnets, autographs of famous people),
wax figures (Queen Victoria, Venus), stuffed and live animals, an aquarium,
and outright hoaxes (a replica of Niagara Falls, the Fejee Mermaid, the
Woolly Horse), Barnum's American Museum "quickly became the most
famous place of entertainment in nineteenth-century America. Nothing
quite like it had existed before, either in the Old World or the New"
(McNamara 219). The Museum attracted people of all classes and ranks--
Whitman, Thoreau and James, in addition to foreign and domestic
dignitaries and leading religious figures all visited and talked about Barnum's
place. From 1841 until 1868, Saxon reports that 38 million admission tickets
were sold. This astonishing fact is compounded by the fact that in 1865, the
population of the United States was only 35 million.37

Barnum's "Lecture Room," a large theater that he renovated in 1850,
occupied the second floor of the Museum. The room, which housed up to

3000 people, was a cultural site of pleasure where middle class values of

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propriety and piety were offered to the public in dramatic representations.

The name "Lecture Room" was a euphemistic moniker for a theater in which
moral dramas and public exhibitions were acted out before large crowds of
Americans who were looking for fun, but queasy about attending the City's
more suspicious theatrical establishments. Recalling an earlier discussion, we
can talk about the shift from Peale's museum to Barnum's as representative
of the movement in post-Revolutionary America from a culture of
Enlightened rationalism to one of sentiment. While Peale intended to
mirror Nature with the hope of instructing humankind, Barnum used his
Museum (particularly his Lecture Room) to instruct the masses in
temperance and moral propriety. Consider the open letter he addressed to
various editors in June of 1850 regarding the opening of his "Lecture Room":
The new "room," Barnum explains, will be modeled after the exhibition
room in his Philadelphia Museum (recently acquired from the Peale estate)
"which receives the approbation and countenance of the great body of
clergymen, the religious community at large, and all of the first families in
that city . . . " (Selected_Letters 43). Barnum continues by explaining the
moral mission of the "Lecture Room":
My plan is to introduce into the lecture room highly moral and
instructive domestic dramas, written expressly for my establishments
and so constructed as to please and edify, while they possess a powerful
reformatory tendency. Wm 43 emphasis in original)
By mid-century, society is still considered corrupt and Barnum's insistence on
the reformatory power of his theater attests to the demand and the rhetorical
power of reform of mid-nineteenth-century culture. The conflation of the
sentimental with the theatrical is perhaps no where else more evident than

in the following:

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My whole aim and effort is to make my museums totally

unobjectionable to the religious and moral community, and at the
same time combine sufficient amusement with instruction to please all
proper tastes and to train the mind of youth to reject as repugnant
anything inconsistent with moral and refined tastes.
Every vulgar or profane allusion and gesture is scrupulously avoided,
and nearly every person in my employment . . . is a teetotaler.
(Selectedjetters 43, emphasis in original)
Like an evangelical revivalist of the 18305, Barnum managed to combine the
sacred and the ostensibly profane like no other American theatrical manager
before him. Barnum's "Lecture Room" was theater for the middle classes and
the culture of sentiment. Consider the words of AS. Saxon, who despite his
apparent unawareness of the ideological implications of Barnum's appeal to
the middle class sensibility in his "Lecture Room," is correct in saying that
Barnum
made theater into something it had rarely been before: a place of family
entertainment, where men and women, adults and children, could
intermingle safe in the knowledge that no indelicacies would assault
their senses either onstage or off . . . (105)
On the surface, Barnum's business was to confirm rather than challenge
dominant ways of thinkinguhe entertained his audiences with shows they
wanted to see--renditions of W and a pirated dramatic version of
W were only a few of the moral melodramas acted on the
stage of the "Lecture Room." Spectators looking for a drink would not find
one in Barnum's Museum; indeed, he even prohibited his patrons from
leaving the theater between acts in order to imbibe.38 So concerned was

Barnum to keep his theater free from alcohol that he employed detectives to

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roam around and evict any dubious characters. Upon entering the theatrical

establishment, spectators were given the opportunity of signing a teetotaling
pledge.39 Of course, the notorious "third tier" of early nineteenth-century
theaters was never allowed in Barnum's "Lecture Room." Barnum
vociferously defended his theater against accusations of impropriety: "No
vulgar word or gesture, and not a profane expression was eyer allowed on my
stage! Even in Shakespeare's plays, I unflinchingly and invariably cut out
vulgarity and profanity" (quoted in Saxon 107). Yet, the "Lecture Room,"
while it derived from the lecture rooms that Peale used in his museum, was a
new phenomenon in American popular culture. Simply put, the "Lecture
Room" made it safe for the sentimental culture to participate in American
theater. Of course, Barnum was not alone in this endeavor—we have already
examined Anna Cora Mowatt's earlier (1845-1854) efforts at making the
theater approachable for the middle classes.

Barnum's great push for middle class respectability and his most
dramatic wedding of the theatrical and the sentimental occurred during the
Jenny Lind American Tour of 1850-1851.40 In addition to suggesting
Barnum's commodification of the Jenny Lind "enterprise" (an adjective he
was fond of using to describe the tour), the following anecdote from Life, in
Thomas Couser's words, "reflects his sense that their contract [Jenny's and
Barnum's] wedded him to a personification of the Victorian ideal of a chaste,
genteel, and cultured woman" (59): One day Jenny approaches the showman
"in a playful mood" announcing "a most extraordinary report": "I have heard
that you an I are about to be married. Now how could such an absurd report
ever have originated?" Barnum, a verbal punster, replied, "Probably from

the fact that we are 'engaged'" (319).

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Barnum shaped and molded Jenny Lind's image for public consumption

in a middle class culture of sentiment. If Jenny Lind would never have
existed, Barnum probably would have invented someone like her. Gregory
Green has, rather flippantly, termed Jenny Lind a "sanctified burlesque
queen" (390), but for the much of the American public at mid-century she was
an angelic Diva.41 Indeed, Jenny was a Puritan at heart and Barnum did not
have to do a great deal of "image management" in creating her appeal from
the middle classes. Early in her career, Jenny Lind had won her reputation by
appealing to the moral sensibilities of her listeners. Theatrical life was still an
offense to the respectable mind and Jenny provided her European listeners
with a respectable alternative to the sordid lives of many European
performers.42 A Puritan in her sensibilities, Jenny Lind began her career with
the intention of helping the "theatrical profession to raise itself from the
quagmire into which it had sunk. . . " (Bulman 20). She made her name on
the European continent by performing operatic roles and dressing in the full
regalia of the parts she played. Uncomfortable with this, she gave up opera,
and purportedly her stage life, just prior to signing the contract with Barnum.

Jenny's ambivalence with the performing life was something she held in
common with her American listeners; indeed, America was made for Jenny
Lind as Jenny Lind was made for America. When Barnum set out to present
Jenny Lind to the public, he engaged the public interest on moral and
religious as well as aesthetic grounds, representing Jenny to the public as they
would like her to be and as a visible embodiment of their own values.
Consider the following passage from an advertisement Barnum used in
February of 1850: . . so anxious am I that the United States should be visited
by a lady whose vocal powers have never been approached by any other

human being, and whose character is charity, simplicity, and goodness

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personified" (quoted in Ware 4). Aware of the dubious glances the American

public let rest on public performers (especially women), Barnum inundated
the public presses with images of Jenny Lind that stressed her philanthropy
and Puritan aesthetic.

When Jenny Lind arrived in New York on 1 September 1850, she was
greeted by 20,000 adoring fans who had never seen her face or heard her
mellifluous voice. Lind's arrival to the United States was just one more
event in the history of the public spectacle in nineteenth-century America.
The first formidable public spectacle of the century was Jackson's
Inauguration in 1828-a well intended event motivated by Jackson's favorite
phrase e_plurib_us_unum, and which eventually became a rabble-rousing mob
action. Of course Lafayette's return in 1824 and Kossuth's tour of the States in
1851 are examples of nineteenth-century public spectacle with rather different
political and national implications than were evident at Jackson's
Inauguration. Lafayette's tour, coming at the tail end of the post-
Revolutionary period, preceded the deaths of Jefferson and Adams by two
years and functioned as a national event that nostalgically confirmed the
history of the American Revolution.43 Kossuth, the Hungarian nationalist,
called "The General Washington of Hungary," arrived in the States on a ship
officially provided by the American government which also honored the
General with a one hundred thousand dollars honorarium for his visit.44

In addition to the spectacle, Lind's arrival represents one of the more
famous "docking" scenes of the American experience. From John
Winthrop's address to his pilgrims aboard the Arabella in 1630 to the
dilemma of General Anderson at Fort Sumter in 1861, the broad canvas of
American history seems to have been primarily acted out on the docks of the

Eastern seaboard. Indeed, there have been some wonderfully vivid "arrival"

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scenes in the history of the American experience. After Winthrop's and his

crew's solemn advent, we might think about the events of the Boston Tea
Party on 16 December 1774.45 Consider, too, Jackson's defense of New
Orleans against the ominous appearance of the British in 1815.46 Lafayette's
much-celebrated landing to New York's Battery on 15 July 1824 is another
example.47 Also, the arrival of the French ballet dancer, Fanny Kemble in
the spring of 1840, is explained by Ivor Guest as such a grand affair that "No
other theatrical celebrity—not even the great singer Malibran, who had visited
New York in 1827--had been awaited with such eager excitement as Fanny"
(44).

Lind's arrival, an early example of an emerging culture of personality, is
vividly described by Barnum in Life:

Thousands of persons covered the shipping and piers, and other
thousands had congregated on the wharf at Canal street [sic], to see her.
The wildest enthusiasm prevailed as the noble steamer approached the
dock. So great was the rush on a sloop near the steamer's berth, that
one man, in his zeal to obtain a good view, accidentally tumbled
overboard amid the shouts of those near him. (307)

In February of 1850, Barnum received word that Jenny Lind had agreed to
the terms of Barnum's offer and would make a grand tour of America.
(Incidentally, he had never seen or heard Jenny Lind, either.) Anxious to
discover what the public knew about Jenny Lind, he informs a "gentlemanly
conductor" in New York that he "had made an engagement with Jenny Lind,
and that she would surely visit this country in the following August." The
conductor's response, "Jenny Lind! Is she a dancer?"48 has become folklore.
Barnum took an enormous risk in engaging Lind's services, and had the

"enterprise" failed he surely would have gone bankrupt;49 he remarks that

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the conductor's words "chilled me as if they were ice," and consequently

"commenced preparing the public mind through the newspapers for the
reception of the great songstress" (304).
When Barnum reflected back to Jenny Lind's triumphant opening concert

at New York's Castle Garden on 11 September 1850 he remarked:

The great assembly at Castle Garden was not gathered by Jenny Lind's

great musical genius and powers alone. She was effectually brought

before the public before they had seen or heard her. She appeared in

the presence of a jury already excited to enthusiasm in her behalf. She

more than met their expectations, and all the means I had adopted to

prepare the way were thus abundantly justified. (316)
Indeed, prior to her arrival in the States, Barnum had properly "prepar[ed] the
public mind" by packaging Jenny Lind as a Swedish Diva who was a paragon
of virtue and spirituality (304). Barnum pulled the "heart strings" of the
American public in order to get to their "purse strings" (315). Through
newspaper rhetoric and the dissemination of her romanticized image, Jenny
Lind came to mean something to mid-century Americans before she had
even reached the shores of the New World. Long before Nike bought the
rights to Andre Agassi, Barnum was aware of the power of image. Consider
the following anecdote from Life: As public excitement for the arrival of
Jenny Lind increased, Barnum says he "was particularly anxious to obtain a
good portrait of her" so that he might get her visage out in the public realm
(304). Sitting in the Museum one day, he is approached by a "foreigner" who
offers Barnum a portrait of Jenny Lind, informing the showman that the
singer had recently sat for him in Stockholm. Barnum finds the $50 asking
price reasonable, but when he shows it to a friend, "he quietly assured me

that it was a cheap lithograph pasted on a tin back, neatly varnished, and

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made to appear like a fine oil painting to a novice in the arts like myself. The

intrinsic value of the picture did not exceed 37 1/ 2 cents!" (304). The grand
irony of the incident is made clear 40 pages later when Barnum provides a
two page list of receipts from the Jenny Lind concerts. After copiously
recording the gross totals from each of the cities on the tour, Barnum proudly
announces, "TOTAL RECEIPTS OF 95 CONCERTS, . . . $712,161.34. This is a
typical Barnumesque anecdote from Life which has been excised from later
editions of the autobiography: Barnum takes the bait of the con man and
appears to be duped, but the "Prince of Humbugs" cons the con man and
turns an ostensible $49 dollar loss into an investment that yields a $700,000
gain.

The public Jenny Lind that Barnum constructed confirmed the values and
beliefs of her middle-class American listeners.50 When American audiences
gazed upon Jenny Lind, they saw an ideal representation of their own selves.
"The outpouring of public sentiment was, under Barnum's gentle prodding, a
tribute to an ideal, designed to reflect credit not only on the object of
veneration but the venerators themselves" (Harris, Artist 121). In the Jenny
Lind "enterprise" theatricality of self and a culture of sentiment stand side by
side and buoy each other up. Private selfhood is intentionally stylized in
order to confirm public values. Consider the following account from the
CommerciaLAdyertiser of 21 September 1850 where public morality becomes
a prerequisite for aesthetic virtuosity:

The sweetness and compass of her voice, the simplicity, propriety and
grace of her manners; the correctness of her taste, and the soundness
and strength of her judgment, all combine to make her what she is—the

most charming singer of the age. (quoted in Ware 28)51

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While two words of the passage are used to describe Jenny's musical ability

("sweetness" and "compass"), the remainder of the language is used to
represent Jenny Lind as the sentimental ideal. The author continues with his
(and it is no coincidence that Jenny Lind enjoyed a mostly male following--
one observer noted that 7/ 8 of the audience of her first concert at Castle Rock
was made up of men) praise that is grounded in Jenny's religious character,
gradually becoming the moral arbiter who measures self-worth according to
personal piety:

Her earnest desire that the life and example should be on the side of all

that is praise-worthy, and her sincere respect for religion and for those

who profess it, have made her beloved by the friends of all that is noble
and exalting.

We have good reasons for knowing that she holds the Sabbath in high

reverence and honor; greatly desires to pass the sacred day in the

performance of her religious duties, and is grieved to find that she
cannot go to church without attracting a crowd.
The ambivalence here is palpable: the author (and his readers) have been
seduced by the ethereal voice of Jenny Lind, but, suspicious of the performing
self of the public stage and worried about the aesthetic power of one woman,
there is a hard-boiled attempt to figure her into the epistemology a culture of
sentiment and of latent Puritanism.

In the American reception of Jenny Lind we begin to see a spectacular
acceptance of an adorned public self that is quite contrary to the private self.
Jenny Lind was widely known and recognized for her philanthropic sacrifices
and her streak of Puritanism, yet the Jenny Lind that was represented to the
public was a caricature with these very sentimental ideals distorted and

overextended. Less concerned with expressing the private self in the public

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realm (Fliegelman's reading of the oratorical Revolution) by mid-century,

Americans were comfortable with the radical discrepancies between private
and public natures. Indeed, as we see in the figures of Barnum and Lind, the
private nature is easily masked and veiled behind the self-stylized public self.
In certain situations, the masking of selfhood and the consequential
implication of a dynamic self is not only accepted, but applauded and held up
as a national figure.52
Consider the rhetoric Americans used to describe their Jenny Lind: The
following appeared in Boston's Semifleeigly_Adyertiser on 25 September
1850:
She possesses a personal fascination which not only shines through,
but for the moment completely glorifies features which are certainly far
from beautiful. This charm is partly owing to a simplicity and
naturalness of manner which appears to be simple and natural beyond
any other which was ever seen or heard of; but in the greatest measure
to an expression of countenance, residing chiefly in the eye, which
amounts to absolute fascination, and almost to witchery . . . (quoted in
Ware 3)
Jenny Lind's artistry is lauded for the way she copies Nature, for the
naturalness of her performances, but it is a representation far from Peale's
methods of imitating Nature in order to teach and instruct. Jenny Lind--her
body and her voice—becomes a work of art, a representation or copy of the
natural order that bewitches the viewer and sends (mostly) him into raptures.
By mid-century, the Romantic imitation of Nature propels the viewer into a
mystical reverie and suggests an ideal world beyond the corporeal. "God
revealed Himself not simply in the splendor of His plan (the Linnaen

synthesis that captivated Enlightenment philosophers)," explains Neil Harris,

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"but in the more specific pleasures and beauties of flowers, sunsets,

mountaintops, and butterflies" (Artist 137). "Through Jenny Lind I first
became sensible of the holiness there is in art," explained her contemporary
and confidante, Felix Mendelssohn, "through her I learned that one must
forget oneself in the service of the Supreme" (quoted in Bulman 67). Even
William Ellery Channing, who was not referring to Jenny Lind in the
following quote from his sermon, "The Essence of the Christian Religion,"
suggests the nineteenth-century inclination to see certain physical images as
"emblems" for the transcendent order: "We think, perhaps, that nature has a
beauty of its own, in which we can delight, without reference to any reality
above it. But natural beauty is an image or emblem of harmonious qualities
of the mind. It is a type of spiritual beauty" (quoted in Wolf, Reflsion 27).
Clearly, Americans saw Jenny Lind in the light of a Romantic, post-Calvinist
world view where the manipulation of senses (sight and sound, primarily)
through the ostensible imitation of the natural order suggested a spiritual
world outside the temporal order or the realm of consciousness and impelled
the listener or viewer along the road to self-realization and fulfillment.53
"The objective of art lay far beyond its own existence or the production of
pleasurable emotions. Its purpose was individual fulfillment, attained by
uniting the spectator's mind with some great universal expression and
reproducing within him the thought which animated the artist" (Harris,
Artist 175). Through the manipulation of her vocal chords, Jenny Lind
excited the sensory perceptions of mid-nineteenth century Americans and,
consequently, she became a physical embodiment that mediated "the
discrepancies between the ideal and actual" (Harris Artist, 171).

Yet, ironically, the public Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale," the

"Nordic Songstress," was hardly the public representation of the unadorned

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private Jenny Lind. The above account, not untypical of other contemporary

accounts of Jenny Lind, suggests the aestheticization of the (female) body and
voice of Jenny Lind that her reviewers were wont to engage in. Jenny's
artistry, which her listeners appropriated as a physical mediation, appealed to
the nineteenth-century Cult of Sincerity. Ironically, Jenny Lind was loved for
the ostensible naturalness of her performances: "Her performances seemed
natural rather than artificial, the spontaneous expressions of a great talent"
(Harris, Humbug 117). Yet, as we have seen, Jenny's public persona was
artificially created by Barnum's grand public campaign to prepare the
American mind. In effect, Barnum, the master of honest duplicity, placed a
mask of sincerity and naturalness over the public visage of Jenny Lind (as he
was so wont to do with his exhibitions) and convinced the American public
(or did they convince themselves?) that the simulated Swede was a divine
representative of the nineteenth-century cult of sincerity.

Americans rhetorically transformed Jenny Lind into a Divine
representative; she became an aestheticized object in the eyes of her critics and
spectators. She is frequently referred to as a "seraph" or a "fairy songster"--
one reviewer talked about the "divine lamp burning within Jenny Lind"
(Ware 29)--and in her biography of Lind Joan Bulman remarked, "The very
way she stood on a platform was in itself full of charm, and standing there in
her simple pale blue gown with green flowers in her hair and hands she
seemed to them transformed before their eyes into a kindly angel" (60).
Consequently, an accurate representation of Jenny Lind remained elusive, the
inevitable fate of all Platonic conceptions. Nathaniel Parker Willis, who
begins to emerge as one of the nineteenth century's commentators most

concerned with the problems of representation (recall his thoughts on the

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daguerreotype in Chapter One), lamented that fact that no artist had found

the correct way to paint Jenny Lind:
There is great competition to be the painter of Jenny Lind. Mr.
Barnum, we understand, has engaged a portrait for his palace of
Iranistan. . . . It seems to us that no one of the dozen engravings
purporting to represent Jenny Lind has any reasonable likeness to her,
as we have seen her. (quoted in Ware 29)
Willis gets to the heart of the nineteenth-century problem of representation,
suggesting the subjectivity of perception and calling into question the ability
to represent reality:
And, indeed the longer we live, the more we are convinced that people
see the same features very differently, and that one face may make two
as different impression on two beholders as if they had been all the
while looking on two different faces.
The daguerreotypes of Jenny Lind reveal a plain, almost homely-looking
young woman—next to Barnum's exotic Circassian beauties, Jenny Lind was
just another face in the crowd. Indeed, a survey of paintings of Jenny Lind are
wildly unlike the images of Jenny Lind captured by the daguerreotype and
suggest the inclination of Lind's portraitists to apply their imaginative powers
in transforming the "real" Jenny Lind into a highly idealized and Romantic
Jenny Lind.54 The portraits of Jenny Lind are done in the most romantic and
imaginative style imaginable—when Jenny Lind is converted to oil paints she
comes out looking almost exactly like the rhetorical descriptions in the
newspapers-~thin, ethereal, almost coy, and quite lovely-looking.
Furthermore, when she emerged from behind the curtains of the public stage
and stood under the enchanting gaslight, a transformation occurred in the

public perception of Jenny Lind. In the following, Willis is talking about the

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elusive qualities of the stage countenance of Jenny Lind and continues

lamenting the inadequacy of reproductions of her image:

Her living features seem to us illuminated with an expression of
honest greatness, sublimely simple and unconscious, and in no picture
of her do we see any trace of this. It is a face, to our eyes, of singular
beauty-beauty that goes past one's eye and is recognized within—and
the pictures of her represent the plainest of commonplace girls. . . .
Have we no American artist who can give us Jenny Lind's face with its
expression? (quoted in Ware 29)

Through his exhibition of sentimental and sensational culture, Barnum
became the consummate public man of the nineteenth century—he supported
a sentimental family and confirmed sentimental values through his work in
the market economy. Consider the following incident which appears in Life:
Following his return from England, where he famously exhibited Tom
Thumb before Queen Victoria, in 1847 Barnum "was surprised to find that I
had also become a curiosity during my absence" (292). He has become an
object of the public gaze, remarking, "If I showed myself about the museum
or wherever else I was known, I found eyes peering and fingers pointing at
me, and could frequently overhear the remark, 'There's Barnum,‘ 'That's old
Barnum,’ etc" (292). As he was sitting in the ticket office of the Museum one
afternoon, a man approached the booth and purchased a ticket, inquiring if
Mr. Barnum was in the Museum. The ticket-taker pointed to the showman
and Barnum acknowledged his own identity. Barnum reports that the man
stared at him for a moment, "and then, throwing down his ticket, he
exclaimed 'It's all right. I have got the worth of my money;' and away he
went, without going into the Museum at all!" (292-293). The incident is rich

with the theatricality of selfhood that Barnum so relished: framed in the

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booth, Barnum has become his own exhibition—a public "curiosity" displayed

before the public. The incident, which nicely illustrates Richard Brodhead's
idea about the "reconcentration of self into sight" in nineteenth-century
culture,55 is particularly interesting in regards to an earlier discussion of
Barnum's masking his identity from unsuspecting strangers (Culturesof
Letters 62). Here in his own element, his "home," the public can
contextualize, and then recognize and interpret the showman. Again we see
how the culture of exhibition "means" in the sense that it challenges the seer
to "read" the display and create meaning. The commodification of self is
important here, too, because had the man espied Barnum prior to buying the
ticket, we might wonder if the showman would have reported the incident in
the narrative. For Barnum, who saw every physical object for its use value in
the market, it matters that the man paid to see him.
With his private life safely cast aside, or simply never developed, Barnum
exercised his freedoms, through the use of language and event, to stylize a
public persona. All of Barnum's biographers have speculated on the
possibility that Barnum lived without a private life. Constance Rourke
theorizes that
Perhaps, indeed, Barnum had no personal character. In a strict sense
he had no private life. He lived in the midst of the crowd, in the
peopled haunts of his great museum, on the road, on the lecture
platform, on steamers, in caravans or circus trains, near the smell of
sawdust or under the spreading lights of the city. He lived in public; at
times it seemed he was the public. (277)

Neil Harris expresses a similar sentiment: "His inner life, if it existed, was

carefully shielded. Irony and sincerity move through his rhetoric like

revolving stages, and their sets are often indistinguishable" (Humbug 5).

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"And in the same way that he kept his personal life separate from his

business transactions," adds A.S. Saxon, "so Barnum kept the former
discreetly veiled from the readers of his autobiography—a work that, properly
understood, is primarily a record of his chief, lifelong business of showman,
and that might therefore have been more accurately titled "the Fublic Life of
PT. Barnum" (7).

Throughout the autobiography, Barnum's field of action is in the public
sphere. He never goes home or spends any time talking about his family. It
is curious, then, that Barnum concludes his first autobiography with three

sections, "Iranistan," "My family,‘ and "Home, Sweet Home." In 1846
Barnum began construction of an enormous mansion in Bridgeport modeled
on the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, England, and named it Iranistan.
Barnum's mansion became a reflection of his own public persona. "Those
who construct their own shelter replicate themselves, at their deepest and
most significant level, in their houses," remarks Jack McLaughlin. "They are
what they build" (vii). Indeed, all of Barnum's public activities (and nearly all
his activities were public) were done in the grand style that reflected his
inclination to turn life into a spectacle. In Barnum's world, even the
domestic sphere is turned into a place for public examination. Iranistan
burned to the ground in 1857, but while it stood, Barnum's mansion was a
model of mid-century sentimentality and ostentation. Indeed, theatricality of
self and nature existed in mutual inclusion with the conjugal sentimental
family.

There are a number of pictures in the 1855 edition of the autobiography.
The first is on the frontispiece and is an image of Barnum sitting in rotund

comfort. It is left to the reader to imagine what Barnum's family looked like-

they never appear in the autobiography. The final picture of the book,

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though, is a romantic rendering of Iranistan in all its ostentatious and

pastoral splendor. Iranistan was a formidable structure done in a Turkish
style with 5 onion-shaped domes decorating the rooftop (4 small domes on
the corners and a large dome in the middle). In the front of the mansion
there are six slender minarets supporting three piazzas; the minarets and
piazzas appear to continue to wrap around both sides of the structure,
supporting two-story porches and one-story gazebos which also play host to
more onion-shaped domes. Two large, statuesque figures grace the tops of
the balustrades leading to the front piazza. Barnum filled his seventeen acres
with carriage houses, barns, pavilions and gazebos, all finished in an ornate
style. The picture is not without its pastoral suggestions, indeed, the
rendering stresses Iranistan as a middle landscape that incorporates the
primitive and the civilized.56 Three bronze deer recline in the foreground of
the picture; off in the distance, another group of deer are congregated near an
evergreen tree. Shrubbery surrounds the immediate structure (familiar in a
late twentieth-century suburban culture, but surely novel in 1848), and
strategically planted evergreens and leafy trees are scattered across the
grounds and embellish the scene. A woman and child are walking toward
Iranistan and, in the distance, standing by the enormous water fountain (a
simulation of a hot geyser, no doubt) are two more women with parasols.
Behind the mansion (not evident in the picture) Barnum had an artificial
pond filled with (authentic) ducks and geese. Of course everything surrounds
and seems to be converging on Iranistan-it is the central focus of the view,
the figures in the picture, and even the wild animals who patrol the
grounds.57

The architectural leap from Jefferson's Monticello to Jackson's Hermitage

to Barnum's Iranistan is worth making; in the history of American domestic

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architecture, Iranistan becomes a model for the increasing acceptance of self-

stylization.

Jefferson spent 50 years building, tearing down, and rebuilding Monticello
and, still, he never felt he had it right.58 Like the rewriting of Barnum's
autobiography, Monticello, for Jefferson, was a life-long passion that he
struggled to perfect and complete. Perched high atop the hills of
Charlottesville, Monticello has become a model of Enlightened reasoning and
American ingenuity. Isolated from the community, and situated in such a
way that the mansion becomes an observation site for the natural order,
Monticello was illustrative of the detached, aloof, and intellectual Jefferson.

In many ways, Iranistan was a grotesque parody of Jefferson's mansion-
Monticello as the sublime and Iranistan as the ridiculous. The onion-shaped
domes certainly resonate with the discrete, scientific, yet dysfunctional dome
atop Jefferson's roof. In contrast, Barnum's dome became an enchanting
theater of the natural world. Forty-five people could sit within Barnum's
dome and gaze through multi-colored, diamond shaped-windows which cast
a strange, almost surreal atmosphere over the surrounding landscape. Saxon
quotes John Hooker's description of a visit to Iranistan in October of 1849: "It
was the most gorgeous display of earthly splendor that I ever dreamed of. It
seemed like being transported into a fairy land." On his visit to the dome,
Hooker expostulated, "I never saw anything so like enchantrnent as the effect
of those glasses upon the view around. One would give everything an
unnatural greenness, the next made it look like mid-winter with everything
covered with frost 8: snow . . ." (157).

Furthermore, William Howard Adams's description of Jefferson's
manipulation of the landscape--"a romantic, overcharged vision of a

transformed landscape, a pastoral make-believe world of temples, towers, and

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statuary"-could just as easily be applied to the grounds of Iranistan (66). In

the autobiography Barnum tells us with typical nineteenth-century aplomb
that he turned a barren plot of ground into a spectacle of wonder and pastoral
beauty: "I should mention," he off-handedly remarks, "that the plot of
ground on which my villa is erected, was a bare field at the date of my
purchase." But after "transplant[ing] fruit, forest, and evergreen trees," he
turned the area into a middle landscape that, in its adornment "would have
required an age in the ordinary process of growth" (404).

In Fathers_and_C_hildren, Michael Rogin nicely historicizes the
Hermitage, reading Jackson's mansion in Memphis as the figural home of
nineteenth-century sentimental culture. In 1819, Jackson and Rachel moved
from a small log cabin into what Jackson called "The Hermitage," a simple,
two-story, affair with four columns and a small porch. The 650 acres of the
premises housed two primitive log cabins and, symbolically, a church that
Jackson erected for Rachel (which became known as "Rachel's Church") in
1823.59 By the mid 18205, Michael Rogin notes, "the extended, historically
rooted family of eighteenth-century America—the Adamses--was giving way
to the conjugal, sentimental family of the market epoch—Andrew and Rachel
Jackson" (64). The Hermitage, then, becomes the place that holds and sustains
the domestic ideal-Jackson built the Hermitage for Rachel; for as hard and
ruthless a man as he was, Jackson did indeed love his wife and the Hermitage
becomes his way of protecting and seeming her while he was off removing
Native Americans and clearing space for plantation owners.

The leap from Jackson's Hermitage to Barnum's Iranistan illustrates the
movement from the sentimental tradition into a cultural milieu in which
the theatrical and the sentimental live side by side.60 If Jackson's home

"prefigured the sentimental-family ideal" (Rogin 66), then Barnum's

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Iranistan looked back in parody and irony. Barnum set up the perfect

sentimental family-Charity Barnum (the name is important), sickly, timid,
and peripheral to her husband's career, was the ideal domestic wife61 and we
might wonder about her wandering around the grand halls of Iranistan.

In contrast to the simple outbuildings (slave quarters) of Monticello and
the Hermitage, Barnum's seventeen acres contained hosts of outbuildings
including pavilions, gazebos—even a palatial home for his gardener. Names
are important here: Monticello, or "little Mountain," has a suggestively
reclusive and demure connotation. "Hermitage," or hideaway, becomes a
moniker for the sentimental idea of the home as a refuge from the social and
political expectations of the world at large. Iranistan, or "Oriental Villa,"
contrasts with both the classical and the sentimental ideal, suggesting the
increasing American middle-class fascination for imported materials and
ideas by mid-century. Jefferson's mansion was remote and aloof, and
Jackson, too, sequestered his home from the public view. Barnum, on the
other hand, left his grounds and outbuildings open for public inspection-~he
was the absolute public man and that meant, for him, that the private realm
(even as far as the grounds of his home) were open for public scrutiny.
Iranistan created quite a bit of public interest when construction was
completed. 1,000 guests were invited to an "old fashioned" housewarming
party on 14 November 1848. The new mansion made the papers, too.
Barnum reports that a "waggish" New York editor interpreted "I—ran-i-stan"
to mean "that I ran a long time before I could stan"--jejune humor typical of
the nineteenth century (403). Indeed, Barnum's home became a billboard for
the advertisement of his self and his business activities. At one time he
bought an elephant and commanded his gardener to hook the beast to a plow

and break the ground in one of Barnum's fields that lay close to the railroad

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tracks with the intent of peaking public interest in the new wild animal

exhibits at his Museum by displaying the elephant before the watchful eyes of
the public as they traveled into the City. The plot succeeded and in addition to
raising revenues at the Museum, Barnum received hundred of letters from
agriculturists asking for more information on the effects of using pachyderms
for field work.
Conclusion: The Vision Thing and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of
Exhibition
The exhibition culture that Barnum both participated in and effectively
manipulated was based on a cultural phenomenon of seeing. Gregory Green
attributes the augmentation and phenomenon of a visual culture to the
decline of the Calvinist order:
The religious injunction against visual excess and embellishment
would have severely cut into a show-man's schemes had Barnum not
shown America, in practice, where it really lived, that the imposed
limitations of Protestantism, both visual and otherwise, could never
accommodate the aspirations of the nation. . . . Simply put, Barnum
taught American to 'look around with pleasure, and upward with
gratitude'" (Barnum 393), but above all, to look around. (386)
A culture of display demands a spectatorship of active vision. Yet what
nineteenth-century subjects saw, and the meaning they drew from sight was
thoroughly embedded in culture (consciousness) and epistemology. John
Berger observes that
It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we
explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that

we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what

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we know is never settled. . . . The way we see things is affected by what

we know or what we believe. (7-8)
Barnum's ability to both confirm and challenge public conceptions of self was
grounded in a culture where meaning was made from seeing. Vision is
"affected" (not determined) by epistemology, and that un"settled"
relationship between seeing and knowing precludes seeing from either
confirming or undermining dominant ideologies.

Deception and misrepresentation of self are the by-words of the
nineteenth-century culture of exhibition. "At one and the same time, things
are what they are as well as what they are not" (139). Roland Hagenbuchle's
paraphrase of the Aristotelian bi-form is helpful in understanding Barnum's
manipulation of seeing and knowing and his methods of the public
presentation of self and Other. For instance, Jenny Lind temporarily became
the divine creation that the American public transformed her into being. A
combination of Barnum's cagey manipulation of the public mind and Jenny's
angelic voice inclined the public and the press to rhetorically turn her into an
angel incarnate. First hand accounts of a Jenny Lind concert reveal a
confusion between Jenny Lind as a human being and Jenny Lind as a
benevolent and mellifluous agent of the Divine. Of course, Jenny Lind was
never anything more than a plain-looking young woman from Sweden with
a voice that gave listeners goose bumps. Yet, for a time, she became more
than that. When the public mind seized on Jenny Lind, the singer from
Sweden took on a cultural significance that raised her above the ordinary
person--she became for a time, more than "Jenny Lind," she became a public
persona with the power to raise intense emotions and the public fever. By
the same reasoning, Joice Heth was never really Washington's nursemaid,

and similarly when Barnum blacked himself he did not become an African

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American, yet . . . for a time, indeed, for a few fleeting moments, while they

engaged their audiences in public discourse on the public stage, Jenny and
Joice and even Barnum did indeed become the people, the "selves," that the
public imagined them to be. Their non-essence (angelic Diva, nursemaid of
Washington, and African American), for a short, stylized period of time,
became their essence-all were transformed by public perception into some
self that was other than what they really were; that is, both were defined
according to what they were not. And it was their ability to perform those
non-essential selves, their aptitude for histrionics, that deceived their
audiences and/ or sent them into spiritual reveries. The biform suggests the
discrepancy between the public and private nature of the individual and
raises questions of personal identity and essential selfhood in the face of the
public gaze.

The upshot is that this culture of exhibition and display (a culture of the
masses) was one in which theatricality of the self was integral. It simply had
to be. The very essence of an exhibition implies a site of subjectivity where
meaning is located somewhere between the footlights of the stage and the
footfalls of the audience. Indeed, the exhibition culture of the second quarter
of the nineteenth century was primarily textual: Joice Heth and her company
of public displays served as texts of antebellum culture—they were read and
interpreted by a credulous and demanding American mass culture. To
exhibit is to hold something up for question, to deny its totalizing teleology.
And it is in the reading, the interpretation, of these human and public
displays that a sense of theatrical selfhood emerges. The public exhibition,
like the act of writing autobiography, defies official closure. Even after Joice
Heth's death, Barnum (with Levi Lyman's help) shamelessly continued the

charade by starting a rumor that Joice was not really dead, that she was alive

162
and well and living in Hebron, Connecticut, and that the woman's body on

whom the Doctors performed their postmortem operation was one "Aunt
Nelly" who had recently passed away and whose dead body was brought as a
stand-in for Joice. Similarly, each of Barnum's many editions (additions) to
his Lite, is a narrative display of a temporal slice of an every-changing P.T.
Barnum. Barnum as much as admitted this in the preface to Strugglesend
minim:
All autobiographies are necessarily egotistical. If my pages are as
plentifully sprinkled with 'I's' as was the chief ornament of Hood's
peacock, 'who thought he had the eyes of Europe on his tail,‘ I can only
say, that the 'I's' are essential to the story I have told. It has been my
purpose to narrate, not the life of another, but that career in which I
was the principal actor.
Couser identifies this passage from Smuggmmnmpm as an example of
Barnum's insistence on his narrative exhibitionism, explaining, "Here
Barnum admits to being a literary peacock--an exhibitionist in print. His
reference to the plurality of the book's 'I's' may also hint at the multiplicity of
the autobiography's supposedly singular first person" (67). Moreover,
Barnum's use of the image of a peacock with ornamentation illustrates how
far selfhood had come in American discourse since the Revolution.
Fliegelman terminates his study of an American culture of performance with
the culmination of the Revolution when the unadorned public man proudly
exhibits his private self in the public square. Barnum, however, becomes an
example of the adorned public man of the mid-nineteenth century--a man of
varying social selves who, through his guarded and concealed private life

became the quintessential public man of the age.

163

Notes

1The allusion is to Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life," a popular nineteenth-
century poem published in Knickerbocker in 1838.

2 Barnum destroyed the plates of the 1855 edition and, consequently, extant
copies are rare. The 1869 and 1889 editions are out of print but the reader of
Barnum's autobiography has a host of blue-penciled editions to chose from.
Most of Barnum's biographers consider George Bryan's 1927 edition of the
autobiography to be the truest version of all three editions. The blue-penciled
editions, however, are ultimately a problem for the reader who is interested
in charting the dynamic tone and scope of each of Barnum's autobiographies.
For a detailed printing history of Barnum's autobiographies see Toole-Stott 1:
147-53.

3For the implications of this announcement on the publication history of the
autobiography, see Toole-Stott I: 147-53; IV: 24-25.

4Barnum has, of course, been the subject of numerous other critical studies
and they are referenced in the essay as they are used.

5Although the two men shared incompatible world views, both demonstrate
an interest in the manipulation of the physical world and the sensory world.
Like Edwards, Barnum was interested in the "potentialities of sensation." See
Harris, IheArhstuaAmencanmmy (171).

6Unless otherwise noted in internal citations, all subsequent quotations from
Barnum's autobiography will be from Life.

7On 11 April 1841, 14 years before the publication of his Lifer Barnum
published a fictionalized autobiography of his life in the NeuLYorlLAtlas.
"The Adventure of an Adventurer, Being Some Passages in the Life of
Barnaby Diddleum," is a fascinating parody of Barnum's (BARNaby
diddleUM) experiences up to that point and an early example of Barnum's
search for ways to inscribe experience and define his self through language.

8Scenes like the following are contrasted in the narrative with scenes where
Barnum is recognized by the public and will be discussed below.

9The barber shop is a curious place in the literary discourse of the mid-
nineteenth century. In American_beauty Lois Banner talks about the barber
and hairdresser shop as spheres in which the artificial presentation of self was
created. See Chapter Two, "Beauty as Business." Barnum relates two
incidents in Life that take place in a barber shop. The first incident reads like
a precursor to the first scene of Melville's Ihe Confidence Man: Traveling on
a steamboat on the Mississippi one day Barnum recalls an incident where he
entered a barber shop abroad the boat and manages to convince the
unsuspecting mulatto that he is the Devil (334).

10Barnum lavishly displays his capacities for duping his friends and
neighbors. There are only two instances in the autobiography where

164

someone takes one over on Barnum. The first was Joice Heth who managed
to convince Barnum that she was indeed the nursemaid of George
Washington. The second is told as an isolated anecdote near the end of Life
when Barnum tells the reader about a woman who tricked him into
believing that his coach was going to be highjacked on the road to Baltimore.
Barnum buys guns for protection and sends all his money back to New York
(339).

11There is a host of secondary literature regarding the nineteenth-century
confidence man and the manner in which I have concluded this paragraph
comes close to Gary Lindberg's definition of a confidence man in The
W: "a manipulator or contriver who
creates an inner effect, an impression, an experience of confidence, that
surpasses the grounds for it. In short, a confidence man mgesbehef" (7).

12For a discussion of the "major" negative reviews of Barnum's book see
Harris, Humbug (224-231). Most of the negative reviews came from the pens
of Southerners and Englishmen and it is important to realize, based on where
these less-than-favorable reviews were coming from, that Barnum and his
book were a confirmation of a North-eastern, industrial-capitalist, middle-
class set of values. His deceptions and consequent revelations were a threat to
the Southern reader and his bombastic rhetoric went unappreciated by the
British critics.

13There is a discrepancy here. Bryan uses a passage that he attributes to John
Fitch. Harris uses the same passage and attributes it to John Fish. Barnum
married Nancy Fish in September of 1874, and Harris mentions that this John
Fish was his future brother-in-law.

14As the English press attacked Barnum particularly hard, Barnum must
have relished this high praise from an Englishman. See "Barnum for
President," Punch 29 (1 September 1855): 89; and "Revelations of a
Showman," BlackmdsfidinburghMagazine, American edition 40 (February
1855):187-201. '

15See Bode, Ihe_American_Lyoeaim; Scott; and Baskerville for discussions
about lectures and lyceums.

16See Cross, for a discussion of religious revivals and the exhibition of
religious sentiment. For a discussion of Barnum's political activities in the
early 18305 and his reactions against "hysterical Christianity," see Saxon 40.
17See Trachtenberg (6-12) for an similar reading of Peale's self-portrait.

18See Sellers, Chapter Six.

19Rourke's reference here is to the popular lecture that entertained
Americans from the 18305 until the end of the century. Poe was not the only
writer using the catastrophe as a narrative device. See Koguchi; Gatta; and
Wallace.

20Barnum's Museum, perhaps the "most famous place of entertainment in
nineteenth-century America," displayed more than freaks, of course

165

(McNamara 219). For a full discussion of the contents of the Museum, see
Saxon Chapter Five, "Wonders of God's Universe."

21See David Rothman for an extended discussion of nineteenth-century
asylums and penitentiaries.

221 am thinking of the "consensus" school of American culture. See
Bercovitch, The American |eremiad; and Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, eds.
I! l l Cl . E . I°| .

23Also see White.

24*0n the representation of Other on the American stage, see Moody,
especially Chapter Two, "Native Themes and Characters."

25Both of these incidents, early examples of Eastern simulations of frontier
life, would be worth further analysis in a discussion of Barnum's
manipulation of the image of the American Wild West. In the Woolly Horse
episode, Barnum purchased an odd-looking horse from an Indiana native
and passed it off to the public as one of the animals that General Fremont had
brought back from his expedition to the Rocky Mountains. The obvious
duplicity was soon discovered by Fremont's father-in-law, Thomas Hart
Benton, but no legal action was taken against Barnum because Fremont
himself was off in the Western territories and unable to be reached. The
Great Buffalo Hunt was an early Wild Bill Cody show attempting to simulate
the dangers and excitement of the Wild West. Barnum bought 700 feeble
buffalo earlier in 1843 and advertised a grand spectacle in Hoboken where a
brave frontier hero would re-enact the herding of the wild and dangerous
beasts. Barnum was right in his suspicion that the event would not go off as
planned--the buffalo, terrified by the crowd headed straight for the nearest
swamp upon being released from their cages. The spectators did not mind,
though, because Barnum let everyone in for free. What they did not realize
at that time, though, was that Barnum had made a deal with the owners of
the ferries that shipped the people from Manhattan to Hoboken and realized
his profits from the public circuitously.

26 For instance in Chapter IX "The American Museum," Barnum relates the
incident with the editor from the Knickerbocker who tricks Barnum into
admitting the duplicity of his artifacts in the American Museum. Barnum
ultimately comes out on top, however, when he tells the editor a new
wonder is coming to the museum--a fish that grows legs. The editor is
amazed and then, finally dismayed when he visits Barnum and discovers
that the spectacle is only a tadpole.

27Barnum and Lyman made a lame attempt to continue the hoax even after
Joice's death. Lyman wrote an article for the New York papers arguing that
Joice Heth was in fact not dead, but alive and well in Connecticut. He also
asserted that the Joice Heth that was being displayed to the public was an
automaton. See Saxon 68-74.

166

28It is interesting, of course, that Sanford would "free" himself from Barnum
in the South and Barnum's language shows that the irony was not lost on
him.

29See Fiedler "Come Back to the Raft Ag' 1n, Huck Honey." Also see Fiedler' s

LamaathhdaJhLAmermNdzel-an obvious critical precedent to
Lott's study.

3OIn his account of the St. Louis stage, Sol Smith, Barnum's close friend
reports another blackfacing incident involving Barnum. In 1840, Barnum
had organized a new troupe of traveling players and the center of the show
was the African American dancer, Master Jack Diamond. Barnum hired a
white dancer to black his face and square off with Diamond in a dancing
match for an ostensible $500 wager. The event was fixed, the blackfaced man
paid to yield to Diamon ' s"masterful" moves. Harris mentions this incident
in Mag (28)

31$ee Couser 57.

32Consider the excerpts from a letter that Barnum wrote to Thomas Ritchie,
the editor of the W and also the father-in-law-to-be of Anna
Cora Mowatt, on 14 December 1850: denying the accusation that Jenny Lind
had donated money to an "association of abolitionists," Barnum "feels no
hesitation" in speaking for Jenny Lind by declaring that "this lady never gave
a farthing for any such purpose, and that her oft expressed admiration for our
noble system of government convinces me that she prizes too dearly the
glorious institutions of our country to lend the slightest sanction to any attack
upon the union of these states" ($12912d Letters of PT. Barnum 52).

33See Buckley (472—75) for a detailed discussion of Barnum's Herald.

34For a discussion of this episode and Barnum's role in it, see Saxon 60.

35Barnum's complexities, or inconsistencies, are evident in the reading of a
letter three years prior to the Lucy Stone letter when he talks about Jenny
Lind thusly: "I know as well as any person that the merits of Jenny Lind are
the best capital to depend upon to secure public favor, and I have thus far

acted upon this knowledge" (W 50).

36Barnum is referring to the opening of his mansion in Bridgeport, Iranistan.

37See Saxon, (Chapter Five), "Wonders of God's Universe" and Harris,
Mug, (Chapter Two), for detailed discussions of the cultural implications
of Barnum's Museum. Also see Buckley (481) for a derivative, but concise
(based on Harris) discussion of the Museum.

38Barnum was a man ahead of his time, setting precedents for the popular
mass gatherings of the post-Woodstock era. Recently, I attended an outdoor
concert at Detroit's Pine Knob Arena and could not help but think of Barnum
when, as I walked toward the arena, I heard a voice over the loudspeaker
informing all concert-goers that the "No-Readmittance" policy would
preclude them from entering and then leaving the area--an obvious holdover
from the "teetotaling" nineteenth century.

167

39See Lyman Abbot's recollection of Barnum's Museum in Silhouettes of my
Cdampmaries (9)-

40Peter Buckley talks about the irony of the Jenny Lind tour following on the
heels of the Astor Place Riots of 1849 and the labor unrest of 1849 (472).

41Is it much of a surprise to learn that Hawthorne and Whitman were
unimpressed with Jenny's voice? Hawthorne, who heard her in England
when he was serving at the American Consulate in Liverpool said that, "on
the whole, [he] was not very much interested in her" (quoted in Werner 132).
Hawthorne met Jenny Lind in 1856 and Jenny, probably not aware of
Hawthorne' s impressions of her singing, complimented him on Ihe_§carlet
Lrette and talked generally about American society. See Mellow (441) for a
discussion of this meeting. In the NenLXorlLEyeningJZost, Whitman
remarked, "The Swedish Swan, with all her blandishments, never touched
my heart in the least. I wondered at so much vocal dexterity; and indeed they
were all very pretty, those leaps and double somersets. But even in the
grandest religious airs, genuine masterpieces as they are, of the German
composers, executed by this strangely overpraised woman in perfect scientific
style, let critics say what they like, it was a failure; for there was a vacuum in
the head of the performance. Beauty pervaded it no doubt, and that of a high
order. It was the beauty of Adam before God breathed into his nostrils"
(quoted in Wagenknecht 40).
42For a discussion of Jenny Lind's "Puritanism" and her early career in
Europe, see Bulman.
43See Klamkin.

44See Nye, MW 14. Also, see Susan
Davis, for a discussion of crowd action during antebellum Christmas
festivities in Philadelphia.

45See Labaree.

46See Ward.

47See Klamkin.

48The conductor was probably thinking of the French ballet dancer, Fanny
Elssler, who successfully toured the States in 1840.

49Barnum engaged Jenny Lind for the sum of $150,000 (she agreed to do 150
concerts ,at $1000 apiece) which he was obliged to place in the hands of
London's Baring Brothers prior to her departure for the States. There were
other fees: $25,000 for Julius Benedict, Jenny's director and accompanist and
$12,500 for Giovanni Belletti, a baritone who would also accompany Jenny.
In order to raise the initial monies, Barnum sold and mortgaged several
properties and still had to borrow the remaining deficit. See Saxon (165) and
Harris (118).

50It is important to stress that Jenny Lind appealed to a middle to upper class
audience. High demand for concert tickets drove up prices, making her
inaccessible to the working classes. The "masses" Barnum refers to in the

168

following passage refers to the emerging demand for middle class, respectable
entertainment: "The carriages of the beammende could be seen in front of her
hotel at all fashionable hours, and it was with some difficulty that I prevented
the fashionables from monopolizing her altogether, and thus, as I believed,
sadly marring my interests by cutting her off from the warm sympathies
which she had awakened among the masses" (308). Note that Barnum calls
Jenny Lind his "interest." In addition, the honesty of the preceding comment,
which is about as private as Barnum gets in the autobiography, is a great
contrast to the disingenuosness of the following advertisement that he
reprinted in Life just four pages earlier: "Perhaps I may not make any money
by this enterprise; but I assure you that if I knew I should not make a farthing
profit, I would ratify the engagements, so anxious am I that the Unites States
should be visited by a lady whose vocal powers have never been approached
by any other human being, and whose character is charity, simplicity, and
goodness personified" (304).

51This sort of rhetoric, the aestheticization of virtue, resonates with Jonathan
Edwards's Ihe_Nature_of_Irue_1irtue, although the nineteenth-century
rhetoric is clearly laced with ideas of sentiment that were not foreign for
Edwards, yet, escaped being the focus of his ideas.

52This statement, of course, has to be qualified. The inessential self and the
masking of the private self were to be nefarious actions throughout the
nineteenth century. Melville explores the continuing problems of selfhood
and self (mis)representation in Ihe_Coutideuce_Mau, and Karen Haltennun
has written a critical study about the continuing fear of the con-man in
nineteenth-century society. The point here is that under certain
circumstances (i.e. the active invocation of sentimental culture), the self-
stylized presentation of the self is less of a danger, indeed, a profitable
"enterprise" in nineteenth-century society.

53For a brief discussion of the ends nineteenth-century Americans went to in

order to see Jenny Lind, and for a brief descriptions of the accounts of Lind
that they left behind, see Buckley 499.

5‘ISee Harris (128) for images of the daguerreotyped Lind and portraits of her.
55For a late-nineteenth century analysis of the phenomenon of self and sight,
see Fischer.

56See Marx.

57For a discussion of larger trends in nineteenth-century architectural history
see Clark.

58McLaughlin says, "Jefferson built one house, tore much of it down, doubled
its size, and continued to alter, remodel, improve, and add to it for decades"
(14).

59The Hermitage burned to the ground in 1834 (six years after Rachel's death)
and Jackson rebuilt it in 1836 with considerable augmentation. The new
mansion, a stately and demure two-story structure with six classical columns

169

and a two-story portico in the front of the house, is the one that visitors to the
Hermitage see today.

6OGeorge Bryan reports that Barnum once called on Jackson at the Hermitage
(xxxvi).

61See Banner's discussion of the "steel-engraving lady" of women's
magazines of the period in Chapter Three.

Chapter Four
Theatrical Selfhood and the Autobiographical Fiction of Nathaniel

Hawthorne

Unlike Mowatt and Barnum, who were both partial to histrionics,
Hawthorne was terrified of the public sphere; he was a retiring figure who
was compelled to become an actor in antebellum American as a result of the
profession he chose. Hawthorne is famous for his reticence. In Yesterday
with Author; Hawthorne's publisher, James Fields, recalled Hawthorne as
someone who "wandered lonely as a cloud," and "who had, so to speak, a
physical affinity with solitude"(39). In a letter to Hawthorne of 1 June 1851,
Melville demonstrates his almost desperate wish to be befriended by
Hawthorne, subtly commenting on Hawthorne's quiet demeanor as well as
his own garrulousness:

I talk about myself, and this is selfishness and egotism. Granted. but
how help it? I am writing to you; I know little about you, but
something about myself. So I write about myself,--at least, to you.
Don't' trouble yourself, though, about writing; and don't trouble
yourself about visiting; and when you do visit, don't trouble yourself
about talking. Iwill do all the writing and visiting and talking myself.
(Correspondence XIV: 192)
Sophia's sister, Lizzy Peabody, also commented on Hawthorne's reserve, but
remarked that "every word [he spoke] was loaded with significance though
there was nothing oracular in his manner." Lizzy added that she "never saw
anybody who listened so devouringly" (quoted in Mellow 115).
Hawthorne, born in 1804, is the oldest of the group I have assembled in

this study. Barnum was born in 1805 and Mowatt in 1819. Hawthorne's career

170

171
as an American romancer began in the early 18205--a full decade before

Barnum would enter his first exhibition and nearly twenty years prior to
Mowatt's first stage appearance. Furthermore, the work of Hawthorne's
fiction I am most concerned with, IhLScarleLLetter, was published in
January of 1850—four years prior to Mowatt's autobiography and five years
before Barnum's Life.

In their own day, Mowatt and Barnum occupied the center stage (to
varying degrees, of course) of nineteenth-century popular culture. Barnum
increasingly held the public attention from the 18305 until his death in 1891.
Mowatt was a public figure to a lesser degree than Barnum, but from the mid-
18405 until the late 18505, New York certainly paid more attention to her than
it did to Hawthorne. Recall that Mowatt's autobiography sold 20,000 copies.
Furthermore, remember that her dramatic hit, Fashion, became one of the
most popular American plays of the nineteenth century. Now, consider that
it took five years for W to sell a mere 10,000 copies.

Compared to Mowatt and Barnum, Hawthorne was ignored in antebellum
America. It was his involvement in political scandals and his US.
government positions, as well as the fiction he produced, that gave him a
public name. His removal from the office at the Salem Custom House in
1849 was about as much notoriety he would experience as an American public
figure. In Yesterdaynyithoauthors, James Fields recalls visiting a despondent
Hawthorne following his removal from the Custom House in 1849.
Informing Hawthorne that he was interested in publishing more of his work,
Hawthorne demonstrated his ostensible obscurity in antebellum America
when he replied: "Who would risk publishing a book for me, the most
unpopular writer in America?"1 Later, after the publication of Ihe_Scarlet
Letter, Hawthorne's name would be popular enough that his friend, Franklin

Pierce, would ask him to write a campaign biography for his, eventually,
successful bid for the Presidency.

Hawthorne was caught betwixt and between allegiances to an older,
patrician, New England sensibility and the rising middle class of Jacksonian
America. Mowatt and Barnum are representative figures of the new middle
class sensibility and illustrative of what Robert Wiebe has called "the opening
of American society." Barnum and Mowatt operated in New York City while
Hawthorne is primarily associated with the world of Boston, Salem, and New
England culture. By 1850 New York was quickly replacing Boston as the most
important American city as the manufacturing, fashion, and literary
publishing markets began to flourish around the ports of New Amsterdam.
In The Profession of Authorship in America, William Charvat explains the
developing polarities of American society in the second quarter of the
nineteenth century, arguing that it was during this time that a struggle
between a "homogeneous patrician society" (New England culture) and a
"rising materialistic middle class without education and tradition2 (nascent
New York culture) developed and was eventually won by the cultural
demands and expressions of the new middle class (64).3

His marginal status at mid-century provides Hawthorne with some
interesting things to say about theatrical selfhood. Indeed, Hawthorne's voice
is particularly worthwhile because it is the voice of a cultural maverick, a
trickster of narrative and language who was at odds with his society and used
artistic forms of expression to challenge dominant ideologies.4 As a retiring
figure who made a career out of writing serious fiction, Hawthorne offers a
perspective into theatrical selfhood at mid-century not available in the
discourses of public figures such as Mowatt and Barnum, who were actors and

showpersons before they were authors and autobiographers. Still, the textual

172

173
world that Hawthorne has constructed is a literary topos where theatricality of

self (especially his authorial self) flourishes. For Hawthorne, the possibilities
of theatrical selfhood are approached in a more self conscious manner.
Unlike Mowatt and Barnum, who often seem almost flippant about the
malleable selves they rhetorically exhibit, Hawthorne seems particularly
aware, even concerned about the problem of theatrical selfhood. One of the
many tensions operating within the corpus of Hawthorne's fiction is the
possibility of a theatrical self at the expense of an essential core of human
thought and being. For Richard Millington, "The malleability of self, one
begins to suspect, is at once the central hope and the chief anxiety of
Hawthorne's work" (49). In the characters and the authorial selves he has
created Hawthorne experiments with the implications of theatrical selfhood,
demonstrating a highly stylized and self-aware position regarding self-
presentation in the public realm.

In W J. I-Iillis Miller has discussed issues
of selfhood in Hawthorne's fiction by reading "The Minister's Black Veil" as a
tale that unveils "the possibility of the impossibility of unveiling"; that is, the
story becomes an inquiry into the tropological uses of masking and veiling
that Hawthorne employs in the story (51). What, finally, lies behind the
artificial mask Reverend Hooper has shrouded himself in? Would an
unveiling reveal the essential, the "true," Reverend Hooper? Or would the
stripping away of the black veil merely reveal another de-facing device? The
"mask behind the mask" theory that Miller posits in his reading of "The
Minister's Black Veil" is applicable to the corpus of Hawthorne's fiction
because it broaches questions of essential and inessential selfhood and forces
the reader to wonder whether selfhood is rooted in essences, or floats amidst

the contexts or the symbolic fields of culture. Hawthorne's romances may not

174
have sold well, but he was a product of his culture and he appropriated the

theatricalization of selfhood and used those discourses as a way to introduce
his self (quite notoriously, at times) into the public sphere.

Arlin Turner has called Nathaniel Hawthorne "one of the most
autobiographical of our writers--in his own way," attributing Hawthorne's
inclination to write about himself to the "consistency of his mind, which
produced a steadiness of purpose and outlook that shaped everything he
wrote" (vi). For Hawthorne, authorship was autobiography, but unlike most
autobiographers who gallantly display a self before the reading public, the
blue-eyed Nathaniel obscured the self that he presented through his fictional
narratives.5 With more of the sensibilities of a Thomas Jefferson than, say,
Ben Franklin, Hawthorne went about the business of authorship and
autobiography in a more self conscious and careful manner than Mowatt and
Barnum.

William Spengemann, who is also interested in collapsing fiction into
autobiography and, consequently, autobiography into fiction, has read
Hawthorne's literary production up through Ihe_$carlet_Letter as
autobiographical discourse. Arguing that the realm of fiction provides a
textual world in which a writer's nature is expressed through language,
Spengemann remarks that "fiction is the only true autobiography" (138),
explaining W as Hawthorne's way of introducing himself into
the public sphere. "By proceeding inward, away from the pleasant but
imperfect exterior," says Spengemann, "and by confronting the horrible but
ultimately insubstantial terrors of the buried life, one can discover the
absolute self, which is also the exterior world made perfect" (139). I depart
from Spengemann when he begins to suggest that Hawthorne believed art

had the potential of revealing a true essential self, that Hawthorne's textual

175
world was a tool for the author to erase the slate (or unmask the face) of

selfhood that had been marked up (or obscured) by culture. Unlike
Spengemann, I contend that Hawthorne, like Ishmael atop the masthead, was
aware of the dynamics of selfhood, and both fearful and strangely fascinated
by the possibilities of a self set free on a search for Cartesian essences.6 In my
reading of his fiction, Hawthorne becomes a showman and a trickster whose
literary excursions into the limitations of selfhood reveal a malleable and

dynamic "Nathaniel Hawthorne."

Selfhood and Nineteenth-Century Sentimental Culture

InIhe_Fall_of_P_ublieMau, Richard Sennet has lamented the demise of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century public culture which he explains as a
phenomenon where personal actions were symbolic acts that reflected back
onto the community rather than the self and where communication between
individuals could take place in the public sphere. Similarly, Fliegelman has
demonstrated that the revolution in rhetoric at the end of the eighteenth
century was based in the idea that public speakers expressed their private
natures when they articulated themselves in the public realm. By 1850 a
Romantic, post-Enlightenment notion of the individual self situated in a
social milieu in which it finds itself alien and at odds with the public sphere
had replaced the Enlightened notions of the transparency of private life in the
public sphere.

In Hawthorne's world, the private self is threatened by the public sphere
and the problem of selfhood; the self-stylized presentation of self is embroiled
in a social world where private natures and public demands are always
working at cross purposes. By 1850, the private world, the interiority, of the
individual, is valorized and nurtured within the domestic sphere.7 InIhe

176
Wk, Joel Pfister has combined textual and cultural

analysis to demonstrate how Hawthorne's fiction illustrates the formation of
a middle-class consciousness of interiorities at mid-century. For Hawthorne,
questions of selfhood are embedded in mid-nineteenth-century discourses of
sentimentality and the valorization/ cultivation of a private sphere of human
activity that works as a corrective against the corruptive influences of the
market world.

The domestic arena of sentimental culture was burdened with the task of
shaping and supporting the sincere and honest expression of the individual
self, and the valorization of sincerity that Fliegelman uncovers in
Revolutionary public culture had, by the middle of the nineteenth century,
been collapsed into the domestic realm of antebellum America. The
turbulent transformations of Jacksonian Americauchanges from Jeffersonian
to Jacksonian republicanism, movement from an agrarian to an urban
culture, and the beginnings of a burgeoning capitalist order that fueled the
transformation of a nation--made antebellum Americans anxious about the
possible duplicitous presentation of self in the public sphere. As a result, the
domestic realm was left with the responsibility of insuring that the sincere
ideal was propagated in the home. As Karen Haltenun explains, "The
broadest significance of sentimental culture between 1830 and 1870 lay in the
powerful middle class impulse to shape all social forms into sincere
expressions of inner feeling" (xvii).

The public sphere, then, was seen as a topos where selfhood could be
manipulated and stylized. And while the domestic realm was absorbing all
the sincere self-expression of the individual, the public sphere was believed to
be a place run amuck with confidence men and painted women. Of course

nineteenth-century subjects devised ways to separate the sincere from the

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insincere (daguerreotypes, phrenology, mesmerism, etc.), but the public realm

increasingly became recognized as a place where impostors-"good" ones such
as Barnum and "bad" ones such as the original confidence man, Thomas

McDonald--operated.

Working at Home: Authorship in Jacksonian America

Unlike Mowatt and Barnum, who capitalized on the social and economic
turbulence of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Hawthorne found
himself victimized by the changes that confronted Americans of the
Jacksonian period. Hawthorne, whose mind gravitated toward the
interiorities of self, buoyed himself up for a career in literature and wrote his
best work while safely sequestered away from the world of markets and
protected by the privacy of the domestic realm. In the world of legitimate
professional careers, Hawthorne's creative energies simply dried up.
Throughout his life, Hawthorne was plagued by the demands of the market
and the ostensibly conflicting demands of an intellectual life. The many
moves he made back and forth from the domestic to the market world were
accompanied by a great deal of anxiety and foreboding: Hawthorne constantly
struggled with the necessity of supporting a family and of performing his
masculine role, and with the difficulty of developing his artistic talents in the
face of a necessary career in the market: Consider Hawthorne's literary
production yis_ayis his stints in the masculine world of Custom Houses and
utopian communities: In September of 1825, Hawthorne graduates from
Bowdin and is faced with the prospect of entering and participating in a
masculine culture that is increasingly becoming associated with the world of
the market economy, and, more importantly, being defined against the

domestic realm. Earlier in the year, however, Hawthorne had revealed his

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first literary productions to his sister Elizabeth. It is important, of course, that

he would be reticent about his literary aspirations before his college friends
and introduce his writerly self to the world through his sister. Balking on
participation in the market world, Hawthorne conceals himself and engages
in a twelve-year literary self-apprenticeship, his "long seclusion," in the garret
on Herbert Street. During the twelve-year withdrawal Hawthorne perfects his
story-telling techniques by reading voraciously and penning tales such as

"The Gentle Boy," "My Kinsman, Major Molineux, Roger Malvin's
Burial," and "The Minister's Black Veil," but it is not until 1834 that
Nathaniel Hawthorne was revealed to the public eye--prior to that date, he
insisted on publishing his tales anonymously.

Hawthorne worked for a brief time as an editor of AmericamMagaziueof
lisehflendjmtertaiuiungedge (January-September 1836), and finally,
after falling in love with Sophia and feeling the pressures of making a living,
he took a job as a measurer in the Boston Custom House in November of
1838. His literary production takes a precipitous decline at this time. Retiring
from the Custom House in January of 1841 and spending the summer of that
year at Brook Farm, Hawthorne thought that the utopian community would
provide the perfect atmosphere for an artist who was forced to labor in the
market. Finding the community at Brook Farm little removed from the
competitiveness of the market world, Hawthorne leaves Brook Farm at the
end of the summer, but remains a joint stock holder. At this time, little has
emitted from Hawthorne's pen since Iwicejoldlales, but in July of 1842,
Nathaniel and Sophia are married, move into the Old Manse, and begin a
three-year honeymoon of domestic bliss that elicits a collection of tales,

Mosses_from_au_Qld_Mause in April of 1845. The domestic privacy of the

Manse allows Hawthorne to pen classic tales such as "The Birthmark" and

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"Rappaccini's Daughter."8 In September of 1845, Nathaniel and Sophia are

asked to leave the Manse. The couple (along with two year-old Una) live off
of Sophia's savings for seven months until Nathaniel, in April of 1846,
begins his famous position at the Salem Custom House. Hawthorne retires
from market life again in June of 1849 when he is removed from the Custom
House. He has produced one tale, "The Unpardonable Sin" (later renamed,
"Ethan Brand"), during this time.9 The public ignominy surrounding his
removal from the Salem Custom House (along with the death of his mother)
throws him into a veritable creative frenzy and, writing through the late
summer and fall of 1849, Hawthorne completes Iheficarletjetter by January
of 1850. The next three years (years free from the demands of the market

world) witness two other major novels, Pierce's biography, a third edition of

Mcejoldlales, a children's book, and IheSuouL-Image, a collection of tales.

Authorship in America: The Importance of Being Seen

The absence of his biological father opened up opportunities that
Hawthorne might not have enjoyed had Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sr. not died
of yellow fever in 1808. T. Walter Herbert talks about the death of
Hawthorne's father as a way for Nathaniel junior to create a writerly self.
Considering the long tradition of seamanship in the Hawthorne family,
Nathaniel's fate most probably would have been guided toward following in
his father's maritime career. "The intimate circle of shared bereavement," in
the Hawthorne household following Nathaniel Sr.'s death, "provided a
matrix for creating a writer selfhood that would not have existed had his
ship-captain father been alive to point the way toward a maritime career, or
even to present Nathaniel with a tangible figure against whom to rebel"

(Herbert 68). Hawthorne seems to have been aware of escaping a life on the

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seas, as he self-reflexively comments in "The Custom-House" essay: "From

father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a gray-headed
shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the
homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast. .
. . The boy, also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a
tempestuous manhood, and returned from his world-wanderings, to grow
old, and die . . . " (1:10-11).

Similarly, the nascent stage of the American novel provided a fairly
"father-less" venue for Hawthorne to develop or rebel against influential
literary voices. In 1821 (when Hawthorne was beginning to think of himself
as a writer of fiction) through mid-century, writing the Romance was still a
spurious activity and a possible threat to the Republic.10 Furthermore, in
1821 authorship was in the nascent stages of becoming a bona fide
professional activity; the aspiring fiction writer had very few precedents to
follow. Irving published the Sketch_book in 1819 and Cooper published Ihe
Spy in 1821 and while both were formidable figures of a developing
American literature they were in turn heavily influenced by European
precedents.11 Hawthorne's first novel, Fanshaure (1828), was an obvious
parody of a Scott novel, but afterwards, Hawthorne took up the challenge of
developing a particularly American voice grounded in the political and
religious history of the colonies. In this way, Hawthorne found himself in an
especially American position: with one father killed off and another scarcely
even there, he was faced with the prospects of self-creation. This position, of
course, was both freeing and terrifying.12

Hawthorne's challenge was to negotiate an artistic sensibility in a culture

in which authorship was a suspect endeavor. Later in his life Hawthorne

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would recall his childhood in a letter to Sophia by employing psychosomatic

language that suggests the "fatherless" dilemma of his early years:
If you know anything of me, you know how I sprang out of mystery,
akin to none, a thing concocted out of the elements, without visible
agency--how, all through my boyhood, I was alone; how I grew up
without a root.
As Herbert suggests, this passage suggests the allurement of memory as
revision. As a child, Hawthorne was surrounded by caring and interested
adults,13 and here he is playing upon the fatherlessness of his boyhood and
talking about the creation of an authorial self: With no precedents to base the
creation of an authorial self upon, Hawthorne imagines himself "concocting"
a self out of thin air. Like Mowatt and Barnum, Hawthorne has invented and
rhetorically manipulated his writerly self through his literary production;
however, for Hawthorne, the prospects of self invention suggest terrifying
implications:
But I cannot overcome this natural horror of being a creature floating
in the air, attached to nothing, nor this feeling that there is no reality in
the life and fortunes, good or bad, or a being so unconnected. (quoted
in Herbert 59)
Unlike Mowatt, who takes her place on the public stage out of necessity, and
Barnum, who flippantly and unselfconsciously engages in the
theatricalizaton of self and Other, the possibilities of theatrical selfhood and
the creation of an authorial self threatened the corporeality of existence of
Hawthorne's world and suggested that the face behind the many authorial
masks he has donned in his textual universes was really just another mask.
As early as 1821, when he was seventeen, Hawthorne was carving a path

for himself as a writer of fiction. In a famous letter to his mother written

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before his matriculation at Bowdin (13 March 1821), Hawthorne demonstrates

a precocious flare for a stylized, rhetorical argument with an irony and a sense
of understatement that would become characteristic of his tales and novels.
Moreover, the cryptic and anxious letter suggests that the young Hawthorne
was aware of pursuing a career path outside of traditional male expectations:
I have not yet concluded what profession I shall have. The being a
Minister is of course out of the Question. I should not think that even
you could desire me to choose so dull a way of life. Oh no Mother, I
was not born to vegetate forever in one place, and to live an die as calm
and tranquil as—A Puddle of Water. As to Lawyers there are so many
of them already that one half of them (upon a moderate calculation)
are in a state of actual starvation. A Physician then seems to be
"Hobson's Choice," but yet I should not like to live by the diseases and
Infirmities of my fellow Creatures. . . . O that I was rich enough to live
without a profession. What do you think of my becoming an Author,
and relying for support upon my pen. (XV: 138)14
Hawthorne does not place a question mark at the end of his query because he
has already made up his mind and the psychological maneuver of asking for
the most important thing last is a cagey rhetorical move.

Had Hawthorne been aware of the changing social role of the American
author during the second half of the nineteenth century, he might have even
considered becoming a "Minister." With the development of market
capitalism, authors of fiction were compelled to be aware of an increasingly
diverse and large (by mid-century America boasted the highest literacy rate in
the world) audience that made demands upon the fiction that was produced

and, consequently, affected the development of an American literature.

183
Deciding early in his life that he wanted to be an author, Hawthorne

prepared for the kind of career that authorship had offered white American
men from the end of the Revolution through the early 18205. But
Hawthorne quickly discovered that the prospects for learned gentlemen
writing anonymously for small, homogeneous audiences was quickly
becoming an historical anachronism.15 As a market economy polarized the
spheres of men and women and as literary production and consumption
gradually became associated with the domestic sphere, Hawthorne found that
the precedents for establishing a career as an author were quickly
disintegrating as the role of the American author was increasingly caught up
with the demands of the burgeoning capitalist economy.

During the second quarter of the nineteenth century the profession of
authorship in America increasingly became a realm of activity that demanded
the author present himself in the public sphere and establish a relationship
with his or her diverse reading public. By 1850, authorship meant being seen
and heard in the public sphere. Whitman, the Barnum of the literary
American Renaissance, was able to perfect the dynamics of public authorship
through his bombastic self-promotion. Recall, for instance, the letter from
Emerson in praise of LeayesoLGrass that he shamelessly printed (without
Emerson's permission) in the New York Tribune.16 Whitman adapted to the
changes in the function and the role of the American author, changes, of
course, that were precipitated by an expanding market economy and the
culture of spectatorship and exhibition that were quickly becoming an integral
part of American popular and high culture.17

Authorship became associated with being seen by the public and in order
to be successful, the writer of creative fiction found it necessary to engage in

the type of self-promotion that Barnum and Whitman perfected.18 "Cultural

entrepreneurs," such as James Fields and William Ticknor, "devised
sophisticated techniques for merchandising art, treating the writer's
biography and even his appearance as important factors in the selling of his
books" (Gilmore 4). Of course the writers of the American Renaissance (except
for Whitman) were all rather ambivalent about the public presentation of
self. When asked to provide an image of himself for the magazines, Melville
replied, "The test of distinction is getting to be reversed; and, therefore, to see
one's 'mug' in a magazine, is presumptive evidence that he's a nobody"
(quoted in Gilmore 4). In 1848, Hawthorne's publishers requested the author
have a daguerreotype made of himself for the purpose of "manufacturing you
thus into a Personage" (quoted in Herbert 164). For Hawthorne, the
daguerreotype sitting must have seemed like a mockery of his career as an
author: he had yet to write the novel that would win him fame, and his time
in the Custom House daily threatened the possibility of continuing his career
as an author. It's no wonder, then, that T. Walter Herbert notes the dramatic
contrast between the 1848 daguerreotype which shows a "wary, hostile, and
tightly controlled" Hawthorne and the famous portrait he gave to his mother
in 1840, showing the youthful and bright-eyed Nathaniel at the start of his
career (Herbert 164).

Hawthorne's decision to become a writer of fiction placed him in a
spurious position. In addition to the ostensible lack of material in the new
republic, scribbling had yet to become professionalized and, in America, was
associated with domesticity and the heightened imaginations of women.19
While women's sphere gradually became associated with the home and the
moral standardization and resuscitation of America's youth, men's sphere
embraced the wide-open and profitable markets created by an expanding

economy and a vast continent. T. Walter Herbert has argued that

184

185
Hawthorne's two careers (author and Custom House clerk and measurer)

represent two dichotomous spheres in antebellum America and "embraced a
chronic interior tension" (6). Hawthorne shuffled back and forth between the
two distinct spheres of market and creative activity and, consequently,
acquired a curious sense of doubleness regarding his position in antebellum
America. Authorship and manhood did not seem to be compatible. William
Spengemann defines Hawthorne's "autobiographical problem" as "his
abiding sense of himself as two quite distinct and unrelated persons, one
public and typical, and the other private and unique" (135). Yet, the divisions
within Hawthorne's sense of himself as public and private figure were not
innate, but social constructions based on culturally accepted spheres and the
roles men and women were expected to play in each; that is, the divisions
within Hawthorne's mind were the result of public expectations of what it
meant to be a man or a woman. Hawthorne lamented the time spent
cloistered in the garret in Herbert Street because it "seemed a departure from
normal manliness" (Herbert 6). The demands of authorship--quiet
contemplation and plenty of free time—were quite antithetical to the hurried
and risky aspects of the market world. Authorship was performed "at home"
and by mid-century, fiction was primarily consumed by women. Middle class
white men in antebellum America were expected to participate in the
expanding market economy and when Hawthorne decided to pursue a path
of literary achievement, he deviated from the expectations of antebellum
masculine culture.

It's no wonder then, that upon graduating from college, Hawthorne
returned home to Salem to begin what he liked to call his "long seclusion" in
his mother's house, or the "Castle Dismal"--there was simply no other place

to go, except "home," in order to prepare for the business of authorship.

186
Although his twelve-year "hibernation" has been greatly mythologized--he

was never as isolated from society as he and many of his biographers
claimedZO—Hawthorne did indeed sequester himself from the battleground of
the market as he sat quietly and contemplatively under the eaves of his
mother's house on Herbert Street. In her memories of her brother, Elizabeth
Hawthorne reports an incident that took place during the "long seclusion"
that is paradigmatic of Hawthorne's precarious position as a man trying to
create art in antebellum America: Despite his inconspicuousness after his
return to Salem upon graduation from Bowdin, Hawthorne acquired the
public reputation of an idler. Wakened to the sound of fire bells one night,
Nathaniel ventured out of the house to inspect the scene. On the way, he is
chastised by an old woman who "scolded him in threatening terms . . . in her
indignation 'at a strong young man's not going to work as other people did'"
(quoted in Stewart 322). James Fields further suggests Hawthorne's outsider
status in Jacksonian American following his return to Salem in 1825:
When the whisper first came to the timid boy, in that "dismal chamber
in Union Street," that he too possessed the soul of an artist, there were
not many about him to share the divine rapture that must have filled
his proud young heart. Outside of his own little family circle, doubting
and desponding eyes looked upon him, and many a stupid head
wagged in derision as he passed by. (69)

Hawthorne found himself in a quandary when he graduated from Bowdin
in 1825. His chums left school and dived right into the business of building
America as they busied themselves with the pursuit of careers that were
quickly becoming professionalized and, hence, legitimized and, more
importantly, lucrative.21 Franklin Pierce, who graduated from Bowdin a

year before Hawthorne, began a career in law and politics that eventually won

187
him the Presidency in 1852.22 Hawthorne's other pal, John Cilley (two years

Hawthorne's senior), was a star in the Maine legislature and was eventually
elected to Congress, only to fall victim in an infamous duel in 1838.23
Hawthorne's best friend and classmate, Horatio Bridge, began a long career of
legal and maritime exploits after graduating from Bowdin in 1825.24 When
Hawthorne went to visit Bridge in Maine during the summer of 1835 (a
decade after their college graduation), Bridge was involved in the building of
a mill dam in Maine; beyond a few tales that were not ill-received,
Hawthorne had yet to accomplish any significant feats.

Hawthorne's friends had faith in his talents and while they wanted to see
him succeed in carving a name for himself in the nascent field of American
literature, they were also convincing in their arguments and attempts to get
blue-eyed Nathaniel out of the house and into the man's world of making
and counting money. Bridge, especially, was a stalwart believer in the talents
of Hawthorne and in addition to loyally searching for government jobs for
his friend, Bridge was also instrumental in the publication of Moe-told
Iales, promising the publisher to cover the costs of publication should sales
be disappointing.25

Hawthorne's friends were not aware of the loss of Hawthorne's creative
energy when he entered the masculine world of markets. James Fields also
encouraged Hawthorne to make his way in the market world, but in his
recollections admitted that he did not understand the dulling effects of the
market world on Hawthorne's literary talents: "In my ardent desire to have
him retained in the public service, his salary at that time being his sole
dependence,--not foreseeing that his withdrawal from that sort of
employment would be the best thing for American letters that could possibly

happen,--I called, in his behalf, on several influential politicians of the day,

188
and well remember the rebuffs I received in my enthusiasm for the author of

the 'Twice-Told Tales'" (49).

Hawthorne lamented the time he spent in the Herbert Street garret, but he
was equally rueful about the time he spent in market activities. Indeed, his
unwitting entrance in the market world nearly desiccated his literary career,
but, as I will argue, Hawthorne devised ways to continue his literary pursuits
while embroiled in the market world.

Writing to Longfellow on 4 June 1837, Hawthorne laments his unwitting
seclusion from society: "Since we last met--which, I remember, was in
Sawtell's room, where you read a farewell poem to the relics of the c1ass--ever
since that time, I have secluded myself from society; and yet I never meant
any such thing, nor dreamed what sort of life I was going to lead" (XV: 251). It
is curious that Hawthorne would posit the beginning of his withdrawal from
the "main current of life" with Longfellow's reading of a farewell poem upon
their graduation from Bowdoin. The way he has set this up, it almost seems
as if Longfellow's poem--his art--drove Hawthorne underground. To
Longfellow, Hawthorne would lament: "For the last ten years, I have not
lived, but only dreamed about living. It may be true that there have been
some unsubstantial pleasures here in the shade, which I should have missed
in the sunshine; but you cannot conceive how utterly devoid of satisfaction
all my retrospects are" (XV: 251). Like Hester Prynne, Hawthorne performed
and perfected his art while a prisoner: Employing metaphors of
imprisonment to describe his situation, Hawthorne laments, "I have made a
captive of myself and put me into a dungeon; and now I cannot find the key
to let myself out—and if the door were open, I should be almost afraid to come
out." "Sometimes through a peep-hole," he continues, "I have caught a

glimpse of the real world" (XV: 252).

189
Consider the sorrowful letters he wrote to Longfellow concerning the fate

of his career in literature after clerking in the Boston Custom House: In a
letter to Longfellow written on 16 May 1839, Hawthorne ruefully predicts the
end of his literary pursuits: "If I write a preface [for Mcefloldlales], it will
be to bid farewell to literature; for, as a literary man, my new occupations
entirely break. me up" (XV: 310). The mixed intentions here are interesting:
Hawthorne tells his friend that he may give up the idea of authorship, yet he
will do it in protest by authoring his adieu in a preface rather than a
conclusion. Hawthorne threatens to give up authorship for good, but he is
never convincing in his threats to give up this writing career. At the same
time Hawthorne was writing these lamenting letters to Longfellow, he was
penning wonderfully passionate love letters to Sophia. Based on the sheer
volume and intensity of the love letters, it appears that he was ready to
transfer all of his creative energy into his relationship with Sophia, but he
was also clearly using the hours spent writing her letters as ways to perfect
and explore his authorial self as well as his "lover" self. This may be why,
indeed, Hawthorne addressed some of his letters to Sophia to "Mine Own
Self."25

In Nathaniel's world, Sophia became the agent that pulled him out of
obscurity and helped him introduce himself to the world. If art, or the
pursuit of the craft, drove him from the masculine world of markets and into
a prison where he perfected his trade, a white Dove pulled him out of his
dusky garret and alleviated the pains that his ostensibly failed career as a
writer had caused. By 1838, Nathaniel and Sophia had been in love for nearly
one year (the first love letter is dated 6 March 1837) and Nathaniel's literary
journal had been replaced by his letters to Sophia. As he was penning the
mournful letters to Longfellow, he was writing highly stylized and literary

190
essays on love and romance to Sophia. Hawthorne was practicing his trade as

much as he was expressing his love when he was writing those wonderful,
passionate letters to Sophia. Ten days after he had predicted the end of his
literary career to Longfellow, Hawthorne was busy penning one of the
hundreds of passionate letters to his fiancee, exclaiming:
My feelings do not, of their own accord, assume words-at least, not a
continued flow of words. . . . I feel as if my being were dissolved, and
the idea of you were diffused throughout it. . . . It is very singular . . .
that, while I love you so dearly, and while I am so conscious of the
deep embrace of our spirits, and while this is expressed by our every
embrace of our hearts, still I have an awe of you that I never felt for
anybody else. (XV: 316)
Nina Baym has noted the highly artificial stylization of the love letters,
observing that Nathaniel and Sophia were "playing at being in love":
The letters are full of affectation and pose. Although they are deeply
sincere, they are also elaborately artificial. Indeed, the writer gets
sincere delight from their very artificiality. In love at last, Hawthorne
was playing at being a lover, playing at being in love, and the entire
correspondence is evidently a game which both he and Sophia were
participating with the greatest enthusiasm. (86)
Furthermore, Hawthorne is willing to discuss his worldly troubles with
Longfellow, explaining his delay in reviewing Longfellow's Hyperion and
Moices_of_the_Night by exclaiming on 26 December 1839, "My heart and brain
are troubled and fevered now with ten thousand other matters" (XV: 393).
Yet, in his letters to Sophia of 24 December 1839 and 1 January 1840,
Hawthorne's worldly worries are muted and veiled behind his effusions of

love. Herbert explains Hawthorne's unwillingness to reveal his worldly cares

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to Sophia as a result of his need to keep his "Dove" sacred and free from the

taints of the market world (121). "Privatized expectations compulsively fed
upon a nineteenth-century middle class sentimental discourse that
represented womanhood as a human hearth whose domestic function was to
keep a beleaguered masculinity, chilled in the marketplace, emotionally
warm and secure" (Pfister 6). In ostensibly losing his life in literature, he has
found it in his future life with Sophia and, moreover, while the duties of the
Custom House preclude his literary production, his love for Sophia (a
domestic, private, almost religious affection) only fuels his imagination,
prompting imaginative expressions that will later be employed in his
Romances.

Hawthorne used his letters to Sophia to smooth out the turbulence that
participation in the market made within his creative life and he seems fairly
comfortable, even excited, by the highly stylized self he projects into those
letters. He often talks about how she affected his private world, how she freed
him from the prison he made for himself on Herbert Street.27 As evidenced
in a letter written to Sophia on 4 October 1840, Hawthorne clearly saw his
fiancee as the instrument of his spiritual redempfion and the savior from the
prison of his imagination. Moreover, I am arguing that Hawthorne's
relationship with Sophia (as expressed in the letters) was the medium
Hawthorne used to bring himself out of the seclusion of Herbert Street and
make his authorial appearances in the world. "[AJnd here [the Herbert Street
attic] I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and
sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would
ever know me at all," he wrote to Sophia on 4 October 1840 (XV: 494). To
Sophia, Hawthorne explains that he is finally beginning to understand the
purpose of the prison of solitude he has inflicted upon himself. Had he

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"made [his] escape into the world" before meeting Sophia, he "should have

grown hard and rough . . . and my heart would have become callous by rude
encounters with the multitude. . . . But living in solitude till the fullness of
time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart,
and had these to offer to my Dove." Hawthorne's language is extraordinarily
anti-masculine at this point—the world of the market corrupts and jades the
self, precluding the fulfillment of love and spiritual romance. His
apprenticeship in the "Castle Dismal" effectively cloistered him from the
corrupt machinations of the market world and preserved his innocent self. It
is curious that at the time Hawthorne was writing this letter to Sophia, he
was also considering moving to the utopian community at Brook Farm
which he, no doubt, imagined as a place removed from the strictures of
society imposed by the market world. Hawthorne concludes his letter of 4
October by metaphorically turning Sophia into his creator:
Thou only hast revealed me to myself; for without thy aid, my best
knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my shadow—to
watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own
real actions. Indeed, we are but shadows--we are not endowed with
real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest
substance of a dream—till the heart is touched. That touch creates us-
then we begin to be—thereby we are beings of reality, and inheritors of
eternity. (XV: 495)
Recalling Hawthorne's earlier statement of concocting himself from
nothingness (which was actually written after the letter of 4 October), it seems
that Sophia's intervention in Nathaniel's life has worked as a second
creation, possibly a re-birth. The language of love that Hawthorne employs
here is highly stylized and literary and the life he imagined himself to have

193
lost in literature is re-directed back into the expressions of his feelings for

Sophia.

Hawthorne's language in these letters reveals a great deal about masculine
culture in the nineteenth century. His desire to be seen, to be known, to step
out into the wider world and make his mark is typical. Indeed, by 1840, his
college chums had all done their part in introducing themselves to the new
republic. But for Hawthorne, and the profession he chose, the prospects of
"stepping out" were more equivocal and difficult, and the herrnitage that,
upon graduation, was supposed to serve as a training ground, gradually
became a center for the incarceration of the self. Hawthorne understood what
all the changes of antebellum America were about, but like Melville (to a
lesser degree than Melville, actually”) and like Thoreau (who Hawthorne
increasingly came to admire”), but unlike Emerson (whom outlived
Hawthorne and became increasingly reconciled with the market economy”),
he was never able to embrace fully the transformations of authorship in
antebellum American.

In Ihe_lmperial_&lt, Quentin Anderson uses Hawthorne as an example of
a mid-century author concerned with the self in society. "Hawthorne was
sure that only in society," Anderson explains, "despite its faults, can we
become human, and he took society for granted as the ground of our
humanity" (ix). For Hawthorne, society was a stage on which the scenes of
human activity were acted out and "the qualities and energies of manhood
and womanhood were deployed" (65). In Hawthorne's textual world, then,
being seen and working in the public realm carries a necessary importance
that is linked with the changing function of authorship in America. In his
Notebooks, he is always calling attention to himself as a recluse; he liked to

think of himself as a man outside of the public sphere, yet he yearns to be

194 .
seen and to see in turn. Authorship, then, for Hawthorne, becomes a

performance that gets his self into the public realm and turns him into an
actor on the public (capitalist) stage.

Aware of the importance of seeing and appearance in public, Hawthorne
became a show-man in his own right, casting veils and donning masks in
efforts to keep the public guessing. In Hawthorne's textual world, the
manipulation of appearances is as important as it was in Barnum's Museum.
Michael Bell says, "we should remember that the art of the romancer, for the
Hawthorne of the prefaces, involves not the casting off of masks-he vows at
the beginning of the Custom House for instance to keep the inmost me
behind its veil--but the manipulation of appearances to insinuate deeper
truths" (48).

In Ihe_$hap_e_ot_HawthorueLs_Career Nina Baym has argued that up until
1850, Hawthorne was primarily interested in writing for his nineteenth-
century audience and, specifically, confirming the values and beliefs of the
hegemony. For Baym, the early Hawthorne was overly self-conscious about
his position within antebellum society and, as a result, his early fiction is
laced with ambivalence about the social implications of waving the unfurled
imagination and the responsibility of the artist/ individual within a given
community.31 By 1850, the period Baym calls Hawthorne's "Major Phase I,"
Hawthorne had become more comfortable with his position as an author in
America, and, consequently, was more inclined to subvert, or at least call into
question, dominant epistemologies. Baym states her purposes clearly in the
preface:

For the first twenty-five years he worked under the influence of a
commonsense attitude about imagination and the artist's place in

society; he put forward very modest claims for literature and for

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himself as a literary man. With W he broke through to

a much more aggressive position, one clearly linked to American and

English romanticism; he describes his "conversion" in "The Custom

House." (8)
Baym's argument demands certain qualifications--what does one do, for
instance, with the tale of 1832, "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," which clearly
questions the glories of the American Revolution at a period when flag-pole
patriotism and literary nationalism were common currents of the young
republic's literary discourse? Also, what are the "links" between English and
American Romanticism?32 This idea of Hawthorne's gradual development,
even evolution, into a confident and, hence, combative, authorial persona, is
an interesting way to begin thinking about how Hawthorne dealt with the
problem of selfhood in the second quarter of the nineteenth century as it
broaches the issue of Hawthome's gradual willingness to challenge cultural
trends.

Baym declares that the authorial persona of the W (first
published in 1837; reissued in an expanded, two-volume edition in 1842 and
then re-published again in 1851) is cautious and self-conscious, more
interested in "decorum" (55) than contest, and "show[s] the writer projecting
back onto society what he assumes to be society's values" (53). Interestingly,
"in order to perhaps better grasp its aesthetic assumptions," Baym encourages
the student of Hawthorne to conceive of the works of the Iwice-joldjales
period as "performance rather than creation" (57, my italics). I'm intrigued
by Baym's argument and its suggestion that, somehow, Hawthorne in his
early phase(s) was less true to his essential authorial position than he became
in, what she calls, his "Major Phase"(s). The suggestion, of course, is that as

an overly-self conscious author, ambivalent about his position within the

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framework of a social system in which fictional authorship was suspect,

Hawthorne the writer was putting on a show (much like Oberon in a story
from Iwiceetold_Iales_, "Passages from a Relinquished Work"33) for his
readers by disguising his more subversive intentions and interests. If the
early phases were "performance," then, as Baym says, the "Major Phase"(s)
were bona fide "creations" that naturally emitted from the very soul of the
writer. Hawthorne's career, it seems, progresses from superficial
experimentations with language into projections of his essential nature into
the literary works he produces. There is no doubt that Hawthorne's career
evolved and that, as Baym contends, he gradually became more comfortable
with his place as an author of American letters. Yet, the model she sets up is
curiously similar to the very Victorian notion that the Great Writers
somehow exuded their best works from the very essence of their being.34

For my reading of Hawthorne's literary production up through Ihe_Scarlet
Letter, all of his attempts at authorship, indeed, his very conception of what it
means to be an author, is indeed a performance, or an inquiry into the
stylization of self and an attempt to both present and obscure the self, in all its
changing forms, to his readers. Hawthorne's performances, however, were
quite different from Whitman's methods of self promotion. For Hawthorne,
authorship involved a negotiation between his private desires to create
fiction and public expectation of the writer's role in antebellum America. His
literary performances are attempts to cryptically, even flirtatiously, introduce
himself to his readers. The idea of "Nathaniel Hawthorne" is lurking around
and behind all of the textual characters (including the voices of the prefaces)
but, like the characters he creates, "Nathaniel Hawthorne" is a subject of
culture who tempts us with the disturbing proposition that behind the veil

he removes is only another veil.

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Hawthorne was aware of the authorial personas he was creating and he

was always bemused by his readers' inclination to read his own self into the
literary personas. In the 1851 preface to Iwiceetoldjlales, Hawthorne amuses
himself with the conception of his self that readers have formed after reading
W:
This kindly feeling, (in some cases, at least,) extended to the Author,
who, on the internal evidence of his sketches, came to be regarded as a
mild, shy, gentle, melancholic, exceedingly sensitive, and not very
forcible man, hiding his blushes under an assumed name, the
quaintness of which was supposed, somehow or other, to symbolize his
personal and literary traits. He is by no means certain, that some of his
subsequent productions have not been influenced and modified by a
natural desire to fill up so amiable an outline, and to act in consonance
with the character assigned to him; nor, even now, could he forfeit it
without a few tears of tender sensibility. (IX: 7)
What is intriguing here is that Hawthorne would remark that his
"subsequent productions" may have been influenced by the public persona
that his (limited) readership had attributed to the author. It suggests that if
the early work was a "performance," then subsequent productions (which
would include IhejcarleLLetter, as Hawthorne re-wrote this preface a full
year after its publication) were written with the intention of maintaining this
public persona and showing his readers what they wanted to see without
giving away the self behind the authorial veil. Indeed, Hawthorne reminds
the reader that the tales "are not the talk of a secluded man with his own
mind and heart . . . but attempts to open an intercourse with the world" (IX:
6). The tales, then, become mediums of self-expression, perhaps even

personal letters that attempt to explain or introduce the authorial self to the

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community. Commenting on Hawthorne's 1851 arrangement of the Iales,

Nina Baym remarks: "It is not difficult to see that although ideas of balance,
variety, and reader appeal surely played their part in Hawthorne's decision,
the overriding criterion was the presentation of the author. . . . Each tale and
sketch needed to be tested against the final impression of himself that
Hawthorne wanted his readers to receive" (69). Similarly, Michael D. Bell
(who oftentimes sounds very much like Baym) comments: "If we wish to
understand the author, we must understand how he has both hidden and
revealed his own 'essential traits' by projecting them into his characters--
including, of course, the character 'Nathaniel Hawthorne' who addresses us
in the prefaces . . . " ("Arts of Deception" 45). Since I am arguing against
Spengemann regarding the existence of an essential self that can ultimately be
revealed, I am less concerned with uncovering that elusive "Nathaniel
Hawthorne" than I am with looking at the rhetorical devices he uses to
create, conceal, and reveal a self. In this way, Iuiceztoldlales (and, I will
argue, Mass_es_fr_am_aa_Qld_Maas_e and W) are as
autobiographical as they are fictional and represent attempts of the author to
introduce and stylize a public self.

Hawthorne would not have been at odds with critics who have read his
fiction as a series of literary performances. In the preface to Iheefiuouelmage
(1851), Hawthorne addresses his readers who believe fiction reveals the
identity and the private nature of the author by remarking that a person
"who has been burrowing . . . into the depths of our common nature, for the
purposes of psychological romance" will be amused by the "talk about his [the
author's] external habits, his abode, his casual associates, and other matters
entirely upon the surface." Reminding us that "These things hide the man,"
Hawthorne suggests that, "instead of displaying him. You must make quite

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another kind of inquest, and look through the whole range of his fictitious

characters, good and evil, in order to detect any of his essential traits" (XI: 4).
This is curious, especially when we realize that Hawthorne's characters
themselves have very few "essential traits." Indeed, as is the case in Ihe
Scarlet_Letter, the main characters of that tale are continually revising and
remodeling themselves, casting off and donning any number of social selves
and masks in their attempts to negotiate their own private sense of self with
the demands of the public sphere and the secret desires and machinations of
their own hearts.

In the autobiographical preface to Mosses_trom_an_Qld_Mause (1846),
Hawthorne ostensibly reveals more of his self to the public than he had in
previous works.35 Hawthorne and Sophia were very protective of their space
and privacy in the Edenic atmosphere of the Old Manse. When Margaret
Fuller proposed that Ellery Channing and his wife board with the
Hawthorne's, Nathaniel firmly refused, explaining to Fuller that "the
comfort of both parties would be put in great jeopardy," and further
remarking that "Had it been proposed to Adam and Eve to receive two angels
in their Paradise, as boarders, I doubt whether they would have been
altogether pleased to consent" (quoted in Mellow 214). Yet, in this extended
account, the rather indolent and bemused Hawthorne cordially invites the
reader into his abode, providing a pleasant tour of the house and region, and
gently leading the reader along: "Perhaps the readernwhom I cannot help
considering as my guest in the old Manse, and entitled to all courtesy in the
way of sight-showing--perhaps he will choose to take a nearer view of the
memorable spot" (X: 6). As Hawthorne continues to show the reader around
the grounds and reveal more of his own self, the hyphenated aside comes to

seem comical and baiting. The irony of the aside and Hawthorne's ostensible

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good nature becomes palpable as Hawthorne gradually reveals his antipathy

to hospitality and courtesy when it comes to revealing his true self.
Performatively, it may have been uttered under Nathaniel's breath in an
almost notorious, sinister fashion. This is certainly Hawthorne putting on a
show.

Hawthorne begins with a tour around the surrounding countryside:
"Come," he beckons after leading us through an old Indian village, "we have
pursued a somewhat devious track, in our walk to the battle-ground" (X: 8).
Along the way, he reveals a few anecdotes of local history, and takes us
through his orchard and garden as well as the venerable library of the Manse.
Hawthorne introduces his male friends (his "buddies"?) from the
neighborhood: Mr. Thoreau makes a cameo and Hawthorne goes on an
exciting canoe ride with W.E. Channing. Mr. Emerson is mentioned and
lightly satirized. Later, the talk turns from realistic sketches of the natural
landscape (his canoe ride with Channing is pleasant reading) to more
psychological interests, and we notice Hawthorne reaching his ostensibly
favorite place--"cloud land." As the preface evolves, Hawthorne's interest
and authorial vision become increasingly abstract and "other-worldly." (In
Herbert's paradigm, this would have been the perfect time to introduce
Sophia.) There is talk of ghosts in the Manse: "Houses of antiquity . . . are so
invariably possessed with spirits" and the apparition within the garret of the
old Manse (whom Hawthorne affectionately refers to as "our ghost") was
known to "heave deep sighs" in the corner of the parlor and rustle over
papers "as if he were turning over a sermon" (X: 17). The ghosts, of course,
are references to the former inhabitants of the manse, clergymen who
practiced for their Sunday performances, as well as an echo of Hawthorne's

former self who was sequestered away in the attic of his mother's house.

201
Hawthorne is reticent about his domestic life: the Manse decade is

highlighted by his marriage to Sophia (9 July 1842) and representative of
Hawthorne's recent removal from public life. The Old Manse that
Hawthorne begins to introduce his reader to is not necessarily the Old Manse
he shared with Sophia. Indeed, she does not even appear in Hawthorne's
tour, and knowing about Sophia's inclination to stay at home, we might
imagine her hiding in the closet.36 At the Old Manse, Hawthorne and
Sophia enjoyed three years of domestic tranquillity and perhaps these
omissions have motivated the concluding sentiments of the prefatory essay.
Slightly apologetic, and overtly disingenuous, he excuses himself for
"babbling through so many pages about a moss-grown country parsonage, and
his life within its walls" (X: 32). Of course, he had divulged very little, almost
nothing, about his life in the Manse and almost triumphantly draws our
attention to this when he exclaims that he "has not betray[ed] anything too
sacredly individual to be revealed by a human spirit . . . " (X: 32). Quickly, the
kindly tour-guide who, until this point, has been expressing the utmost
courtesy (and, we have been led to believe, forthrightness) to his guests, very
unapologetically, almost gleefully, reveals how very little he has divulged of
his self:
How narrow--how shallow and scanty too--is the stream of thought
that has been flowing from my pen compared with the broad tide of
dim emotions, ideas, and associations, which swell around me from
that portion of my existence! How little have I told!-and, of that little,
how almost nothing is even tinctured with any quality that makes it
exclusively my own! Has the reader gone wandering, hand in hand

with me, through the inner passages of my being, and have we groped

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together into all its chambers, and examined their treasures or their

rubbish? Not so. (X: 32)
Taken by itself, this passage reveals a common theme of Hawthorne--the
incommunicability of human emotions and sentiment.37 However, read in
the context of the Miceetoldjales preface where "the Author" suggests that
the malleable public persona has been manipulated to fit the expectations of
his audience, the concluding remarks of "The Old Manse" can be read as an
inquiry into the possibilities, even the necessity, of self-stylization and the
theatricalization of a public self. "The Old Manse" portrait, then, becomes
more than an essay on the foibles of human communication and a fairly clear
statement regarding the malleable nature of self. For Hawthorne, theatrical
selfhood became a tool to obscure the self from the demands of the public
sphere; he seems pleased that despite his thirty-page ramble over the territory
of the self, he still hasn't given anything away. His exclamation points are
not lamentations, but celebrations. In many ways, Hawthorne, who earlier
promised to be such a congenial host, has tricked the reader, admitting to not
being "one of those supremely hospitable people":

So far as I am a man of really individual attributes, I veil my face; nor

am I, nor have ever been one of those supremely hospitable people,

who serve up their own hearts delicately fried, with brain-sauce, as

tidbit for their beloved public. (X: 33)
Kenneth Dauber has also pointed to this passage, using it as an example of
Hawthorne's ostensible ambivalence regarding essential selfhood and
querying, "What is Hawthorne saying? If 'the inner passages' of his being
remain concealed, why boast about it? 15 Hawthorne proud of his
superficiality? . . . . Hawthorne, we imagine, is not really in the surface he

speaks. The 'common sunshine' exists only to conceal the uncommon

203
darkness, the real self he invites us to learn" (164). But Dauber, unlike

Spengemann, does not stop here, continuing the questioning by wondering if
Hawthorne had difficulty believing in Cartesian selfhood: "Or we imagine,
perhaps, that Hawthorne does not himself understand this real self. . . . We
presume a Hawthorne behind Hawthorne--revealing himself, concealing
himself—but the true object of our reading" (164).

So an essay that started out so congenial and friendly almost turns nasty at
the end. Hawthorne veils his face, wears the mask, reveals that he has been
concealing his self, and wonders about the possibilities of essential selfhood.

It is worth lingering over Hawthorne's use of the old Manse as a narrative
device. As I demonstrated in the Barnum chapter, domestic architecture is a
inviting mechanism for suggesting the interior life and Hawthorne (who was
very interested in the semiotics of architecture) does not lose his chance here.
"The Old Manse" essay begins with an extended representation of the Manse
and its former inhabitants, clergyman, mostly, who, as I have noted, still
seem to live there with Hawthorne and Sophia. Our first glimpse of the
structure is through "two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone" and the view
is unimpeded by the gate itself which has "fallen from the hinges, at some
unknown epoch" (X: 3). The last occupant, a "priest," passed away nearly a
year previous, so the path to the front door is overgrown and two "vagrant"
cows and a horse meander around and chew the foliage. Hawthorne wants
the reader to know that this domestic sphere is removed and polarized from
public life, not like the grounds of Iranistan which were open for public
inspection: there are "glimmering shadows, that lay half-asleep between the
door of the house and the public highway," which gives the structure itself a
"spiritual medium" that does not seem to belong to the "material world" (X:

3). Even passing strangers cannot pierce the shadowy interlude between

204
highway and threshold, so the abode provides an equitable amount of

privacy. Hawthorne reveals that he is the first layman to occupy the Manse,
which effectively distances himself from his fellow clergymen, but also helps
to establish himself in the position of a mediator, although rather than
reconciling God and man, Hawthorne takes responsibility for bridging the
gulf between fantasy and fact. 38 As he takes up his position in the old home
that had housed generations of "priests," Hawthorne puts on the clerical garb
and leads us around his abode (until about page 30, the reader is indeed a part
of Hawthome's flock). He is so gentle and amiable, we might even want to sit
down under an venerable oak tree and lay our burdens at his feet, maybe
even confess some hidden sins. Yet, the concluding passages reveal what the
author has been concealing and he continues to use architecture to suggest
these ideas.

Following the passage where Hawthorne reveals his masking, Hawthorne
concludes the essay by detailing the move from the old Manse. "In fairy-land
[the domestic sphere of the old Manse], there is no measurement of time; and,
in a spot so sheltered from the turmoil of life's ocean, three years hastened
away with a noiseless flight, as the breezy sunshine chases the cloud shadows
across the depths of a still valley" (X: 33). The existence of Fairy-land, it
appears, is contingent upon its aged-ness and remoteness of the abode and
when carpenters "next appeared" and consequently disturbed the domestic
tranquillity by "making a tremendous racket," Hawthorne realizes it is time
to pack up and move on. As the carpenters "vex the whole antiquity of the
place with their discordant renovations" they transform fairy-land into a
virtual reality. Most disturbing and, indeed, the event that precipitates the
move is the removal of the vines (obscuring agents) that have been climbing

across the Manse: "Soon, moreover, they divested our abode of the veil of

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woodbine, which had crept over a large portion of its southern face. All the

aged mosses were cleaned unsparingly away; and there were horrible
whispers about brushing up the external walls with a coat of paint . . . " (X: 33).
It is no surprise, of course, that Hawthorne, who safely veils his own face,
finds this improvement "little to his taste" and precipitates the drinking of a
"farewell cup of tea" to the old Manse (X: 33).

In the tales that follow, Hawthorne continues to use masking tropes as a
way to explore issues of selfhood and persists in presenting his self to the
public. Moreover, the tales in the Qld_Manse collection are untypically
autobiographical in their oblique and muted presentation of the authorial
self. Indeed, in tales such as "Rappaccini's Daughter" and "Monsieur du
Miroir," Hawthorne introduces his own self into the text as he uses his
characters and creative personas to continue to veil his face. In "Rappaccini's
Daughter," Hawthorne doubly inscribes himself into the text by naming
himself as the translator of the tale that comes from the pen of a Frenchman
by the name of M. de l'Aubepine (French for Hawthorne). Similarly,
"Monsieur du Miroir" is a playful inquiry into the discrepancies between
public and private identities and a self reflexive tale that ruminates over his

public self as it appears to the private Hawthorne.

Theatrical Selfhood in IheSearleLLetter

"Insincerity in a man's own heart," Hawthorne wrote in his notebooks
sometime between 1836 and 1837, "makes all his enjoyments, all that
concerns him, unreal; so that his whole life must seem like a merely dramatic
representation" (HQMthfiLLQfiMQQk 38). This is Hawthorne the
moralist, acknowledging the American cult of sincerity and without the thick
sense of irony he would develop in his later work. By 1850, the middle-aged,

. 206
world-weary Hawthorne had become something of a cynic. Near the end of

Ihe_S_carlet_Letter, Hawthorne draws forth the moral of the tale: "Be true! Be
true! Be true!" he exclaims, sentimentally encouraging his readers to learn a
lesson from his characters who are not "true." But by 1850, Hawthorne could
not simply let the moral stand as an unambiguous exhortation. "Show freely
to the world," he continues, "if not your worst, then some trait whereby the
worst might be inferred" (I: 260). Might_be_iuferr_ed? A quintessentially
ambiguous and ironic moral, Hawthorne's advice nods toward the values of
a sentimental cult of sincerity yet also undermines those ideological beliefs
and supplants them with the suggestion of the necessity of masking the
private self in the public sphere. Be as true as you need to be, Hawthorne
seems to be saying, but don't give too much away. The different tone of
Hawthorne's notebook and the moral of W is emblematic of
the nineteenth-century's gradual acceptance of theatrical selfhood.
"Gradually," notes Haltennun, "the sentimental demand for perfect sincerity
was losing its tone of urgency and being replaced by a new acceptance of the
theatricality of social relationships" (157).

Hawthorne wrote the following entry in his American Notebooks: "A
dying exclamation of the Emperor Augustus, "Has it not been well acted?"
An essay on the misery of being always under a mask. A veil may be needful,
but never a mask" (VIII: 23). Hawthorne liberally employed tropes of
masking and veiling through the corpus of his fiction, but in Ihe_$carlet
Letter, he comes nearest to writing the proposed essay on the necessity of
veiling of the self and the nefarious repercussions of masking. Hawthorne's
definition of "masks" and "veils" is enigmatic; indeed, the entire phrase that
states veiling is a more acceptable form of self-presentation poses more

questions than it answers. A mask or a veil effectively obscures or defaces the

207
wearer and both present similar problems of interpretation of the individual.

What does Hawthorne mean when he states that a veil may be necessary, but
never a mask? W is about the problem and the necessity of
fragmented and stylized social selves and through the masking and veiling
devices of the text, Hawthorne manages to explain and clarify the distinctions
between the masking and veiling of the self. Hawthorne was particularly self-
conscious about the private self he was projecting to his readership and,
consequently, questions of self-stylization and malleable selfhood that he
deliberated over within his own life get projected into the characters and
literary devices of his fiction. In W Hawthorne suggests that
theatrical selfhood is necessary in order for the individual to negotiate a sense
of him or herself within the standards and expectations of the public sphere.
When malleable selfhood is exercised in order to find a middle ground
between individual desires and pubic expectations, Hawthorne nods his head
in approval and even applauds the efforts. However, there are limits to the
efficacy of theatrical selfhood in Hawthorne's world. When the self is
manipulated in order to engage in activities that threaten the order of society
and/ or obscure dark motivations, when the individual ceases to negotiate
between the private and public spheres and dives into the gratification of
individual consciousness, or the Cartesian vortex of essences, theatrical
selfhood becomes a problem without a solution.

In the opening chapter of Ihe_S_carlet_Letter, during Hester's dramatic
crossing of the prison-door threshold, Hawthorne introduces ideas
concerning the dynamics of appearing and being seen in public, concealing
and revealing of self, and ontological questions concerning Cartesian and
Lockean selfliood. As Richard Broadhead has observed, Hester's first act of the

novel is to brush off the hand of the beadle, who "prefigured and re-

208
presented . . . the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law," as he

prepares to lead her out of the prison and into the Puritan community
(HamhorueLMelyilleautheroyel 56). After repelling the strong arm of
the State, Hester prepares to meet the public gaze:
When the young woman--the mother of this child--stood fully
revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the
infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly
affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which was
wrought or fastened into her dress. (I: 52)
After briefly considering the possibilities of concealment, her second act of the
novel, then, is a brazen act of revelation:
In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame
would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm,
and, with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that
would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and
neighbors. (1: 52-3)

When Hester initially stands before her accusers, she is confronted with
two distinct modes of self-presentation: Either she can attempt to conceal the
emblem of her shame, or openly reveal her letter to the community. Her first

impulse, of course, is to conceal, but, according to Hawthorne, she judges
wisely and removes Pearl from her breast and, with a "haughty smile,"
confronts the public gaze of the community. Ironically, this moment, which
is undoubtedly Hester's lowest point in the text, turns out to be her
redemption from a life of false pantomime and masquerade because it is here
that she acknowledges the role she has to play; it is here that she makes a
decision to be an actor, to play out the histrionic role that the Puritan

community has imposed upon her. From the first scene of the novel, then,

209
Hester is associated with revealing, although it is her concealment of the

father of her child that really upsets the moral order of the Puritan
community. Hester's revelation, then, is ironic—in revealing the letter on
her breast and expressing her haughty smile (a smile similar to the one the
author of the Mosses preface may have worn) Hester suggests a notoriousness
that will eventually confuse the moral code of the Puritan community
through the manipulation of the community-imposed sign. Yet, in this first
scene Hester decides to wear her veil, her costume, candidly and in
Hawthorne's textual world, her decision to openly wear the community-
imposed sign allows her to do "cultural work." For Hawthorne, veiling and
the donning of multiple social selves is imperative. As Anderson observed,
being human, for Hawthorne, meant operating in a community. But in
Hawthorne's textual world being a part of a community also means the
individual is required to negotiate a sense of his or her self within the public
sphere. The gap between private selfhood and the expectations of the public
gaze is bridged by the crafty and political manipulation and performances of
social selves. Hester understands this early and although the knowledge
never brings her instant karma, it allows her to operate in the cultural
milieu in a more effective, certainly more healthy way than her lover,
Dimmesdale, or her former husband, Chillingworth, the two other players in
the novel who also engage in the histrionic presentation of self, albeit with
more duplicitous and less successful outcomes.

The opening scene immediately establishes the very visual aspects of Ihe
W. The romance is about seeing and the problems of interpreting
Signs, it is about exhibition and the public gaze. "The novel," Michael
Gilmore says of IheficarleLLetter, "presents a social environment in which

seeing and being seen, observing others and being gazed at in turn, constitute

210
the principal forms of human activity" (72). Unlike Reverend Hooper of

"The Minister's Black Veil," Hester is on display; she is denied the right to
hide her face, so she engages in strategies that subvert the original
signification of the letter. Hawthorne surely had Reverend Hooper in mind
when the narrator of Hester's tale comments on her inability to shield her
visage: "There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common nature,--
whatever be the delinquencies of the individual,-no outrage more flagrant
than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame" (I: 55). As a woman,
Hester is denied the right to hide her face and to speak her voice; indeed, her
only right in the novel is a negative one--the right not to speak. When she
finally attempts to plead her case (this time in an effort to save Pearl from
being taken from her) in chapter VH1, "The Elf-child and the Minister," she
appeals to Dimmesdale: "'Speak thou for me!‘ cried she. 'Thou wast my
pastor, and hadst charge of my soul, and knowest me better than these men
can. I will not lose the child! Speak for me!'" (I: 113).

Upon her removal from the prison, Hester becomes the object of the public
gaze, an exhibition for the masses. The first sentence of the novel represents
one of the many public gatherings/ processions of the text: "A throng of
bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats,
intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was
assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily
timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes"(I: 47).39 In its
representation of public spectacle and a world of spectators, the novel begins
to illustrate aspects of nineteenth-century exhibition culture that I uncovered
in the Barnum chapter. "For Hawthorne's main characters in particular,"
remarks Gilmore, "the condition of being scrutinized by others is the

dominant fact of their lives" (72). It is no coincidence, of course, that

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Hawthorne has Hester initially reveal her letter in the marketplace. The

letter, a finely wrought piece of work, becomes a work of art and it, along with
the author of the piece, is held up for public scrutiny. "Come along, Madam
Hester, and show your scarlet letter in the market-place," the beadle
sardonically suggests (I: 54). The language here is curiously self-reflexive as
we recall Hawthorne's inclination to describe his years in the garret on
Herbert Street with metaphors of confinement. Indeed, when Hester emerges
from the prison, she is in the selfsame position that Hawthorne found
himself upon terminating his twelve-year literary apprenticeship and
exhibiting his goods and his name (recall that he published anonymously
until 1834) for public consumption.

Stepping across the threshold, Hawthorne employs language that suggests
the display of self in an exhibition culture: a lane opens and an "irregular
procession" follows (this is not the very regular procession of chapter XXI, "A
New England Holiday," where the Puritan magistrates and clerics
demonstrate their stately power). Hester's former haughty expression melts
in the midst of the public gaze: "For haughty as her demeanour was, she
perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to
see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and
trample on" (I: 55).

In this first, dramatic, scene of the novel, Hawthorne manages to express
his own ambivalence about his writerly, masculine self in antebellum
America by using language and images that resonate with his own precarious
position as an author. When Hester finally makes her first of three
appearances on the scaffold, she finds herself in a middle world, a no man's
land, but especially a no woman's land. The Governor and his cohorts "sat

or stood in a balcony of the meeting-house, looking down upon the

212
platform," and the crowd, comprised of "a thousand unrelenting eyes, all

fasted upon her, and concentered at her bosom," stood below (I: 57). With the
general populace below her and the magistrates above, Hester engages in a
dramatic moment of backward imagination as her vision proceeds over the
tops of the head of the people and latches on to images of her childhood in
England. Hester uses the past as a shield against the demands of the
marketplace; she effectively uses history to obscure the uncomfortable
position of the present: "Her mind, and especially her memory, was
preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly
hewn street of a little town. . . . Reminiscences, the most trifling and
immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish quarrels, and
the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came swarming back up her . . . "

(I: 58).

Selfhood and the Language of Sartorial Significations: IheficarleLLetter
Dress was a social issue at mid-century, and although the women's dress
reform movement and Amelia Bloomer's infamous costume did not break
onto the social scene until one year after the publication of Ihe_$_carlet_Letter,
sartorial significations and their ideological implications were part of the
social discourse.40 Americans searched out means to suggest proper ways of
behavior and adornment of the body and, as Haltennun shows in her
monograph, family magazines such as Godey's filled that need. Similarly,
Arthur Schlesinger remarked, "From the late 18205 on this literature [of
family magazines] poured forth in a never-ending stream. An incomplete
enumeration shows that, aside from frequent revisions and new editions,
twenty-eight different manuals appeared in the late 18505—an average of over

three new ones annually in the pre-Civil War decades" (quoted in Roach Ihe

213
VisibleSelf 21). Yet, as Haltenun argues, by mid-century, fashion had become

a means for the expression of theatrical selfhood in the public sphere: "In the
late 18405 and the 18505, the sentimental critique of fashionable dress,
etiquette, and mourning ritual was giving way to a worldly acceptance of self-
display, social formalism, and ceremonial ritual as appropriate expressions of
middle class position" (153).

InAmericau_Beauty, Lois Banner argues that by mid-century fashion
became a way for the middle-class American woman to assert herself within
the confines of nineteenth century notions of womanhood: "Among the
possible options for distinction and advancement for women, fashion had a
powerful appeal. It provided intricate paths to influence and achievement; its
complexities equaled those of masculine business and professions" (24). In
addition, the gradual acceptance of cosmetic stylization in the nineteenth
century suggests how American women were increasingly using various
accouterments to present themselves in the public sphere. Traditionally,
hairdressers and cosmeticians were anathema in a republican society, but by
mid-century, the influence of the Parisian fashion world affected the way
middle and upper class urban women presented themselves in public.
Rouge, which had previously been worn primarily by prostitutes, became
commonly used by urban woman to cover blemishes and embellish facial
features.41 In addition, hair dressers found thriving businesses in New York
and hair styles became the topics of women's magazinesfl‘2

Earlier in the century, the English satirist, Thomas Carlyle ruminated on
the symbolic nature of fashion and clothing in W (1834), a work
that was originally titled "Thoughts on Clothes." Hawthorne (the American

ironist) uses sartorial significations and personal accouterments to broach

issues of selfhood. In BMW Roy Male suggests

214
Hawthome's use of sartorial significations to broach ontological issues in Ihe

Scarletlener:
As the spirit is clothed in flesh and the flesh is clothed in garments, so
ideas are clothed in words. The outer garments may be true to the
inner reality: Hester's ascension [up the scaffold] is a mute utterance
made manifest by the letter which society has vested upon her and
which she has embroidered. Or they may be false covering:
Dimmesdale's ascension at the close depends upon his willingness to
divest himself of the priestly robe. Most of the garments in the book
are accurate reflections of character. (102)
Clothing becomes a part of material culture that suggests Hester's position in
the face of the larger social order. Describing Hester's garb as she leaves the
prison and enters the public sphere, Hawthorne notes:
Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison,
and had modeled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the
attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild
and picturesque peculiarity. (I: 53)
In ostensible defiance against the community's efforts to fashion her spirit,
Hester becomes a creator/ artist who pursues beauty at the expense of the
moral concerns of the larger society. Later in the novel, after Hester has
become the community's most delicate embroiderer, fashioning all the ruffs
and bands and fancy gloves that the magistrates wear in the processions of
State, Hawthorne has stripped Hester of her gorgeous adornments: "Her own
dress was of the coarsest materials and the most sombre hue; with only that
one ornament, --the scarlet letter,--which it was her doom to wear" (I: 83).

The letter still blazes in all its finery on her breast, but the oriental beauty of

215
her garments has been transferred to Pearl who now "was distinguished by a

fanciful, or, we might rather say, a fantastic ingenuity" (I: 83).

Hester has conformed her sartorial significations to the Puritan
expectations, but Hester's needlework circulates throughout the community
and, in effect, provides her with a voice that she is ostensibly denied due to
her fallenness. The magistrates, either too obtuse or vain, do not recognize
the implications of Hester's "work" nor do they realize the rate of exchange
she receives for her handiwork. Hester's art, which consists of the ability to
"add the richer and more spiritual adornment of human ingenuity to their
fabrics of silk and gold" (I: 82), is evidenced everywhere except on the visage
of the bride-to-be: "Her needle-work was seen on the ruff of the Governor;
military men wore it on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it decked
the baby's little cap; it was shut up , to be mildewed and moulder away, in the
coffins of the dead" (I: 83). Hester, as the village embroiderer, adorns the
outer garb-she is the embellisher of self, the hand that stylizes the self and,
consequently, challenges the notions of essential, static selfhood. It is no
mistake, of course, that Hester's needlework is primarily displayed during
state functions and processions and decorates the (Old World) theatricality of
the events.43

Hawthorne's self-reflexivity, his attempts to introduce his self and his
craft to the public, are operating as subtexts within Ihe_$carlet_Letter. For
instance, Hester's craft, her "delicate and imaginative skill" (I: 81) and her
tenuous position within the community is a reflection of Hawthorne's own
sense of his self as a man writing in a cultural milieu where masculinity was
associated with endeavors outside of the home. Hawthorne's art, like
Hester's, is superfluous, not necessary for the general betterment of the social

order and this is what prompted Emerson to remark that "N. Hawthorne's

216
reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good

for anything, and this is a tribute to the man" (Journals VII 465). Michael
Gilmore suggests this much when he calls Hester "the first full-length
representation in American literature of the alienated modern artist" (85).
Ostensibly, Hester conforms to the dictates of the Puritan codes, but quietly
resists through "her needlework and her silence" (85). This is very similar to
the position Hawthorne took up in antebellum America.44 As Michael D.
Bell has argued in "Arts of Deception," Hawthorne inoculates his Romances
against all apparent subversive possibilities by rhetorically pushing them into
cloud—land in the prefaces and pretending to be ignorant of the radical nature
of Romance writing in antebellum America. Hawthorne may as well have
been writing about his self and craft when he said of Hester: "In this manner,
Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in the world. . . . In all her
intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if
she belonged to it" (I: 84).

Hawthorne's use of language to describe the scarlet letter and its
relationship to Hester's and his own sense of self is worth further
consideration. In "The Custom-House" essay, Hawthorne prepares the reader
for the importance of the sartorial expressions of the text. Digging among the
lost papers and relics he happened upon in the garret of the Custom House,
Hawthorne discovers the "greatly frayed and defaced" scarlet A (I: 31). Prior to
finding the foolscap paper that outlines the story of Hester Prynne and,
consequently, explains the history of the letter, Hawthorne speculates on the
former use of the finely embroidered piece: "It had been intended, there
could be no doubt, as an ornamental article of dress; but how it was to be
worn, or what rank, honor, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by it,

was a riddle which (so evanescent are the fashions of the world in these

217
particulars) I saw little hope of solving" (1: 31). Without a history, the letter is

a free-floating sign that carries very little meaning except a certain mystical
curiosity: Hawthorne's eyes (like the eyes of the Puritan crowd when they
first gaze upon the letter) "fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter,
and would not be turned aside" (I: 31). He intuits a larger significance in this
tattered piece of cloth, but can't break the code without the clues of history.
"Perplexed" and "cogitating" over the past use of the letter, Hawthorne
thrusts the essay into its most dramatic moment when he places the A on his
breast and effectively becomes Hester (I: 31). At this moment he is the only
character to wear the letter besides Hester (and who would choose to do so, we
might ask): Pearl tries to make a few facsimiles and it is believed that
Dimmesdale has one inscribed upon his chest. It is the ancient piece of cloth
and not the brief narrative explaining its significance that transmits the
passion and the pathos of Hester's story into Hawthorne's breast. Brandishing
the letter, Hawthorne nearly brands himself when he "experienced a
sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat" (I: 32).
Too hot to handle, the seemingly innocuous artifact becomes a "red-hot iron"
and, shuddering, Hawthorne "involuntarily" (apparently, the discomfort was
pleasing) lets it fall to the ground (I: 32). In Hawthorne's world, the
significance of placing the letter on his breast and feeling the heat of its
significance is a metaphorical act with wide-ranging implications. With this
gesture, Hawthorne introduces, and resolves it seems, his thematic concern
regarding the battle between the head and the heart. This story-teller, this
"Nathaniel Hawthorne," is not the cold and calculating scientist or husband
of the earlier tales who scrutinizes the physical world with their frosty
intellects; "[T]he symbol communicates its social meaning only to the inner

sense of the lonely Hawthorne," argues Charles Feidelson, "not to his analytic

218
and rational public mind . . . " (36). Rather, as the heat burns into his chest,

Hawthorne introduces himself as the bearer of Hester's sufferings and the
translator of her plight into the minds of his nineteenth-century readers.4=5

Clothing, sartorial significations, matter in Ihe_Scarlet_Letter, and
Hawthorne uses the language of clothing and ornamentation
(covering/embellishing of the self) to broach larger issues of concealing and
revealing and selfl'tood. Referring back to the language of the opening scene
of the novel, we recall Hawthorne remarking that Hester deliberated over
concealing the letter "which was wrought or fastened into her dress" (I: 52).
As Michael Rogin has argued in his study of Melville, clothing is an
extension of the self and, in literary discourse, clothing becomes a device that
suggests the language of interior selfhood at the same time it is used as a way
to mask, disguise, or veil, the self.46 It matters whether the letter is either
"wrought or fastened into" Hester's dress and it also matters that Hawthorne
is unwilling to say which it is--wrought or fastened. In Ihe_$carlet_Letter,
Hawthorne is problematizing selfhood, wondering about the essential and
inessential characteristics of the self and sartorial devices aid him in
highlighting these issues. Is the self "fastened" or is it "wrought"? Is it
simply tacked on to a more formidable being, or is it broken down and
molded according to outside forces and machinations?

When something is fastened, it is attached or joined in an unnatural and,
most importantly, a temporary fashion. To fasten is to impose an object upon
another. An article can be fastened into a garment so that is fixed and
immovable, yet it still remains alien to the original weave of the fabric; it can
never be a part of the original make up of the piece. There are sexual
implications here, too, as "fastening" implies securing something from

opening, or locking something up. Furthermore, "fasten" can be used as a

219
signification to alienate an individual as in "fastening blame" on someone (as

the Puritan community does to Hester). Finally, vision is fastened, and just
like the letter is (possibly) fastened into Hester's dress, so is the vision of the
Puritan community fastened onto the sign of her fallenness.

"Wrought," however, has a more permanent and essential connotation
than the signification of "fasten." On one hand, something that is wrought is
finely and elaborately constructed. In one of the definitions in the OED,
"wrought" is defined as "Decorated or ornamented, as with needlework;
elaborated, embellished, embroidered." By attacking the community-imposed
sign as she does—that is, by finely constructing the letter A, and turning it into
an ornament as well as a badge of shame—Hester plays a part in the definition
of her public self and in this way, her self-assertion speaks for her sense of
theatrical selfhood. In addition to performing and executing her duty as the
town's seamstress, Hester becomes an embroiderer, or embellisher of her own
outer garb (external self) and engages in the public stylization of her own self.
Hawthorne, a "notorious" reader of detective fiction and the sensational
press/17 has created in Hester Prynne a character whose public infamy and
whose manipulation of self through the use of masks and disguises (the letter
as mask) comes to seem like a curious echo of Burroughs.48 Hester as
roguish? Her refusal to accept the guilt of her passion that she shared with
Dimmesdale, "What we did had a consecration of its own," along with her
increasing ideas of radical individualism point her in that direction (I: 195).
Furthermore, the confinement of Hester in the Puritan prison and the
notorious signification that her name acquires are similarities she shares with
the textual world of Burroughs' narrative.

Yet, to stop there (as anyone who argues that Hester is subverting the

Puritan dictates through her embellishment of the letter is doing) is to pull

220
up short. In the face of public imposition, Hester enacts her private rebellion

and the result is neither a wholly triumphant Hester (she never really gets
what she wants), nor a victorious Puritan community (they have been tricked
by Hester, but especially by Dimmesdale—although they get to enjoy good
theater around the third scaffold scene). For while "wrought" has a
suggestion of intricacy and handiwork about it, there is also a connotation of
overpowering domination in the word. In another entry for "wrought" the
OED reads: "Of metals: Beaten out or shaped with the hammer or other
tools." When iron is "wrought" it is hammered and beaten into shape; that
is, it is formed by softening the metal (heating) and then twisting it into the
desired configuration. Wrought iron is different from wrought tapestry—one
is an embellishment and the other involves the wholesale transformation of
a physical element at the hands of a master craftsman. Consequently, Hester's
self has been wrought, not solely from the imposition of the State, nor
entirely by her own doing, but from the reciprocal interaction and creation of
meaning between her private attempts at self-fashioning and the public
imposition of her "self" as a fallen woman.

As I explained in the Joice Heth section of the preceding chapter, the public
sphere is a web of conflicting and competing meanings and signs. Meaning in
the public sphere is a system of negotiations between public and private and
dominant and marginal voices. In LearniungCurse, Stephen Greenblatt uses
a Bakhtinian framework to suggest that actions and language within a social
milieu are disordered. The original intentions that motivate cultural
production (speeches, novels, film, letters on women's' breasts) never square
up with the effect those productions have on the larger culture. "The
apparently isolated power of the individual genius turns out to be bound up

with collective, social energy," explains Greenblatt (LearuiuthLCurse 165).

221
Actions are discharged into the complex web of the social milieu and the

implications of those actions are refracted and reflected, distorting and
adapting original significations. "A gesture of dissent may be an element in a
larger legitimation process, while an attempt to stabilize the order of things
may turn out to subvert it" (W 165).

With her voice taken from her and the symbol of shame fastened upon
her breast, Hester finds herself a perambulatory site of ideological discourse.49
Unable to speak, she is spoken to, but the intent of the exhortations is not so
much for her edification (she is already a "fallen woman" with little hope of
redemption). The famous letter that Hester wears on her breast is a
community-imposed sign that defines the mission and values of Puritan
Boston as much as it categorizes Hester as an adulteress. The Puritans of
Boston, then, begin to see Hester according to the way they see themselves
and Hester becomes a text who (that?) performs the same ideological function
as the crime narratives of the seventeenth century.50 Consider the following
passage from Chapter V, "Hester at Her Needle":

Clergyman paused in the street to address words of exhortation, that
brought a crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor
sinful woman. If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath
smile of the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself
the text of the discourse. (I: 85)
Richard Slotkin has argued that ideology is commonly passed through a
culture by oral discourse: "sermons, polemics, credos, [and] manifestos" serve
as rhetorical devices to propagate the dominant ideology (82). The
clergyman's words are spoken not to admonish Hester as much as they are
used as an example for the larger society on how not to act and to define the

trajectory of the Puritan society.

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Yet, through her quietude—her refusal to name the father of her child--

Hester works some Witching spells on the nefarious effects of ideology and
the ability of the community to use her as an ideological tool. The scarlet
letter upon Hester's breast is the mythical symbol that propagates the Puritan
ideology. The letter is a stigma for its bearer and a locus of discourse for the
Puritan authorities. But because Hester refuses to name the father of her
child, the letter remains an arbitrary sign-~its meaning changes with social
and personal circumstances. When the relationship between ideology and
mythology is arbitrary, the power of ideology breaks down. Without a fixed
locus of meaning (which is impossible-~even in death), concepts become
relative to the particular historical circumstances. "Although it must address
contradictions, a culture's mythology and ideology must be mutually
compatible to a considerable degree, if the culture is to have any coherence"
(Slotkin 84).

So there is a certain amount of ideological slippage that occurs in Ihe
ScarleLLetter. At the beginning of the narrative the A upon Hester's breast is
a symbol of the negative effects of dissent from Puritan standards. By
asserting her only right (the right not to speak, not to name her cohort),
Hester Prynne illustrates one way of veiling her self and/ or breaking down
hegemonic authority. (Recall that other masker of Hawthorne's corpus,
Reverend Hooper, also refuses to reveal his reasons for wearing the black
veil.) For as much as the letter serves to define the mission and agenda of the
Puritan community, Hester manages to subvert the intentions of the letter by
turning it into a veil, or a tool of ideological deception. Hester grabs hold of
the A and struggles with the Puritan community for control of the meaning

of that signification.

223
The word "adultery" is never mentioned in the text and the letter

gradually becomes associated with words such as "able" and "angel." By
Chapter XIII, the letter is no longer a symbol of sin, but a symbol of her
calling": "Such helpfulness was found in her,--so much power to do, and
power to sympathize, that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its
original signification" (I: 161). In the eyes of the community, the isolated
pariah of the early chapters becomes "our Hester—the town's own Hester" by
the end of the novel (I: 162). Without a connection between child and father,
mother and father, the symbol remains arbitrary and the individual self
"fastened" to the symbol continually open for interpretation.

Hester's strategies of self-fashioning only go so far, though. Despite the
change in the original signification of the letter, Hester's social self is still
wrapped up in the symbol. While the community might fall prey to the
ideological slippage, Hester's own daughter retains the original signification
of the letter. In Chapter XIX, "The Child at the Brook-Side," Pearl proves that
the tentacles of ideology reach even into the depths of the forest. In the
previous chapter, ironically entitled "A Flood of Sunshine," Hester strips the
fastened symbol, loosens the dark tresses of her hair, and briefly enjoys a few
moments of unadulterated freedom. She effectively unmasks herself with
these gestures, but the liberty is short-lived: Pearl returns from her ramble
and insists that her mother assume her customary garb. Without the symbol
of her social self, Hester steps beyond the limits of culture, beyond the public
definition of self and is unrecognizable. Behind the veil of the letter, it
seems, there is nothing.

Hester engages the Puritan community in a battle of signs; they have
accused her and attempted to "fix" her public/ social self in an effort to define

their own sense of who they are. This should begin to sound familiar,

224
because it is the same model of negotiated selfhood that I have set up in order

to talk about Barnum and his experience with Joice Heth and Jenny Lind.
Nineteenth-century audiences read themselves into the public exhibitions
Barnum paraded before them. Jenny Lind and Joice Heth reflected the
ideological trends and epistemological patterns of their viewers. But cultural
meaning was created somewhere between the public persona that the women
projected out into the public sphere and the manner in which audiences
interpreted their images. Negotiating their selves into the public spheres, the
images of Jenny Lind and Joice Heth took on a life of their own after they
were offered to the public's observation. Similarly, the "Hester Prynne" of
the concluding chapters of W is a social subject created from
the intense negotiations and exchanges between Hester and the Puritan
community.

The men who are connected to Hester spend most of their time
attempting to conceal their past and/ or their other selves, and sartorial
devices help them to do this. Dimmesdale and Chillingworth pay a heavy
price for the parts they play in the masking and disguising of their selves.
While Hester uses garments and adornments to manipulate her self and
negotiate a space within the Puritan community, Dimmesdale and
Chillingworth adorn themselves in order to conceal deep, dark secrets.

When Chillingworth comes to Boston and sees his wife standing in public
ignominy he commits to exploiting his anonymity and exploring the
possibilities of malleable selfhood in the New World. Hawthorne tells us
that when he made his "advent" into Boston he seemed to have appeared
from nowhere. His "first entry on the scene" had "an aspect of mystery which
was easily heightened to the miraculous" as he "drop[s] down" from the sky"

or, Hawthorne cautions, possibly from the "nether earth" (I: 121). When we

225
first meet Chillingworth, he is "clad in a strange disarray of civilized and

savage costume" and his "heterogeneous garb" conceals his physical
deformity (I: 60). Chillingworth's long absence from civilization was spent in
the company of Indians where, in addition to taking on their sartorial
expressions, the scholar also became adept in the art of alchemy.5 1
Chillingworth goes undercover in order to sniff out his wife's lover. "Irked"
that the culprit is not standing on the scaffold of infamy along with Hester,
Chillingworth ominously remarks to a passing stranger, "But he will be
known!-he will be knownluhe will be known!" (I: 63). The repetition of the
phrase (which resonates with the moral of that tale that Hawthorne draws at
the end--"Be true! Be true! Be true!") and the exclamation marks give the
statement an intensity and obsessiveness that defines Chillingworth's
character throughout the tale. During his first meeting with Hester,
Chillingworth effects his dubious masquerade when he changes his name
from Prynne to Chillingworth, decides to represent himself as a
physic/ alchemist, and commits himself to a life of false performance. When
Hester, who has recently received a lesson on the importance of being honest,
queries, "Why not announce thyself openly, and cast me off at once?"
Chillingworth replies without answering, exacting his intention of wearing
the mask of the deceiver: "It may be because I will not encounter the dishonor
that besmirches the husband of a faithless woman. It may be for other
reasons. Enough, it is my purpose to live and die unknown. Let, therefore,
thy husband be to the world as one already dead, and of whom no tidings
shall ever come. Recognize me not, by word, by sign, by look! Breathe not
the secret, above all, to the man thou wottest of" (I: 76).52

Chillingworth continues to effect his performance and begins to sound

like H'awthorne's self-created authorial self:

226
[Prynne/Chillingworth] chose to withdraw his name from the role of

mankind, and, as regarded his former ties and interests, to vanish out
of life as completely as if he indeed lay at the bottom of the ocean . . .
This purpose once effected, new interests would immediately spring
up, and likewise a new purpose; dark, it is true, if not guilty, but of
force enough to engage the full strength of his faculties. (1: 118-19)
Cloistering his former self away, Roger Prynne "vanish[es] out of life" and
"concocts" a new identity under the appellation of Roger Chillingworth.
In Pursuance of this resolve, he took up his residence in the Puritan
town, as Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction than the
learning and intelligence of which he possessed more than a common
measure. . . . It was as a physician that he presented himself, and as
such was cordially received. (I: 119)
Chillingworth, in effect, becomes a confidence man who misrepresents his
self to the Puritan community in order to effect his nefarious mission of
revenge.

The consequences of Chillingworth's performance are not happy. In
Hawthorne's world, Hester saves herself by openly wearing her letter and her
newly wrought self, but Chillingworth's concealment and manipulation of
his self effectively deforms his mind and his body. Mid-way through the
narrative, Hawthorne reveals that respectable townspeople had noticed a
"remarkable change" in old Roger Chillingworth since he took up residence
with Dimmesdale. Upon his arrival, "his expression had been calm,
meditative, scholar-like," but now "there was something ugly and evil in his
face"; indeed "his visage was getting sooty with smoke" (I: 127). Hester, too,
notes the transformation of her husband. Remembering him best as a

"studious man, calm and quiet" Hester is shocked by the "eager, searching,

27
almost fierce, yet carefully guarded look" of Chillingworth (I: 169). He is

anything but calm and quiet in the narrative; indeed, Chillingworth, as he
stamps his feet and raises his hands in the air and speaks in italics and
exclamations, makes the largest racket of all the characters in the novel. "In a
word," notes Hawthorne, "Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of a
man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil . . . " (I: 170).

Throughout the novel, Hester is associated with revelation. Although she
never reveals the name of her lover, she openly and ostentatiously wears the
letter on her breast and she finally breaks her promise with Chillingworth
and reveals herself to Dimmesdale as the self-proclaimed physician's wife.
Dimmesdale, on the other hand, perpetually denies the fact that he is an actor
performing a role and this constant self-betrayal, or hypocrisy, wears him
down to the point that he collapses on the scaffold.

Dimmesdale wears a costume and his clerical outfit becomes an ironic
symbol of the wide gulf between public and private selves. For Dimmesdale,
the sartorial coverings he uses are disguises that obscure his body and the
guilt of his mind. Dimmesdale uses dress to engage in the language of
performance; his clerical outfit gives him a voice and a justification to
surreptitiously speak about his own plight in his public sermons.
Dimmesdale is talking about himself within the subtext of his Sunday
sermons; the clerical costume becomes a way to obscure his own personal
guilt and shame yet project his Christian messages out to the public realm.
Despite the charade he enacts, Dimmesdale is still very real to his
parishioners and although he wallows in guilt and misery, and his private
self is worlds away from how the public perceives him, he effectively
performs his role to his parishioners. Charles Feidelson argues that, through

misrepresenting himself to the congregation, Dimmesdale is "nothing at all"-

228
-neither an effective minister nor, to Hester, an effective lover. According to

Feidelson, Dimmesdale "always comes round to 'the contrast between what I
seem and what I am," or, in other words, Dimmesdale is daily confronted
with the paradoxes of private and public selfhood in the public sphere, or the
Aristotelian bi-form that I explained in the Barnum chapter (66).
Dimmesdale is both a good man and a bad man. According to his own moral
standards and those of the Puritan community, he has sinned and has
probably damned his soul to hell. Yet, when Dimmesdale walks the streets or
ascends the pulpit, he is the town's goodly minister and his parishioners, not
aware of the hidden guilt and sin of the man, perceive him as they expect to
see their spiritual leader.

As the narrative progresses, Dimmesdale gradually loses more and more of
his clothing, exposing more of his physical body to the world as Hawthorne
prepares the reader for the third scaffold scene. With each bit of clothing that
is stripped away or removed from his body, his guilty past is slightly more
revealed. In Chapter X, "The Leech and his Patient," Chillingworth sneaks
into Dimmesdale's chamber, catches the minister napping, and
surreptitiously begins to poke around Dimmesdale's body, looking for clues:
"The physician advanced aside the vestment, that hitherto, had always
covered it even from the professional eye" (I: 138). In his role as public
performer, Dimmesdale conceals the mark of his guilt with his clerical garb.53
Dimmesdale shudders and Chillingworth turns away with a "wild look of
wonder, joy, horror!" (I: 138). What Chillingworth found that made him
stamp his foot on the floor and throw his hands upward remains a mystery in
the text, but what matters here is the removal of a piece of clothing to reveal a
hidden sign.

229
Dimmesdale loses a glove during his midnight vigil on the pillory--the

first of his two appearances upon the scaffold of shame, which increasingly
becomes a stage for the dramatic actions of the text. Perhaps the minister lost
his glove as he was descending the scaffold, for the next morning (a Sunday)
as he descends the pulpit-steps after delivering a "discourse which was held to
be the richest and most powerful" of his career, "a gray-bearded sexton met
him, holding up a black glove," informing the minister that the devil, intent
on usurping God's power in Boston, set it in this most out-of-bounds place (I:
157). Fooled by the belief that pure words transmit from a pure heart, that
public discourse reveals the private self, the sexton cannot imagine
Dimmesdale, who has just preached a sermon that had brought souls to the
truth, engaged in surreptitious midnight activities.

Early in the narrative, as Hester is getting ready to emerge from the prison,
a surly Puritan woman commiserates over the authorities' refusal to deal
more harshly with the sexually deviant woman. The "autumnal matron,"
less forgiving, but perhaps more knowing than the magistrates, realizes that
Hester is getting off easy by simply having to wear a badge of shame: "At the
very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne's
forehead," she exclaims. "Why look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or
such like heathenish adornment, and so walk the street as brave as ever" (I:
51). Hester does not conceal her badge, but she does walk the streets as bravely
as she did before her fall. Dimmesdale's guilt compels him to brand himself,
to deface his body, but his clothing hides the self-imposed badge of shame and
allows him to perform the same social role he did prior to the adulterous act.
Dimmesdale's self-inflicted wounds from his flagellations for penitence
become the signs he cannot bear in the public realm, but which he necessarily

inscribes into his own body. The flagellations, however, become no more real

230
than the garments of mock holiness that he uses to cover them and Male calls

them nothing more than pantomimes: "So long as they are covert, the
minister's gestures are but a mockery of penitence, and his cloistral
flagellations, fasts, and vigils are unavailing" (100). Dimmesdale, of course,
pantornimes his way through the entire novel. His favorite gesture-holding
his hand over his heart-becomes a metaphorical form of false confession that
is so transparent that even little Pearl can see through the duplicity: When
the girl greets her mother with a facsimile of the A on her breast Hester asks
her if she knows why her mother wears the letter to which the little girl
replies, "Truly do I! It is for the same reason that the minister keeps his hand
over his heart" (I: 178-79). Pearl sees the charade because she has not been
formed by the Puritan ideology that precludes people such as the sexton from
imagining the darkness of his minister's soul.

In the forest, Dimmesdale can confess his charlatanism to Hester when he
responds to Hester's statement that he lives a holy life:

‘ There is no substance in it! It is cold and dead, and can do nothing for
me! Of penance I have had enough! Of penitence there has been
none! Else, I should long ago have throw off these garments of mock
holiness, and have shown myself to mankind as they will see me at the
judgment seat. Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter
openly upon your bosom! Mine burns in secret! (I: 192)

The fear of Fifth column is introduced into the narrative after Hester
confesses her concealment of the plot against Dimmesdale: "The very
contiguity of his enemy beneath whatever mask the latter might conceal
himself, was enough to disturb the magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as
Arthur Dimmesdale" (192-93). The irony, of course, is the fact that the head
of the plot is the dyed in the wool Puritan, Chillingworth. Earlier in the

231
narrative he alludes to a religious conversion (again, ironically brought on by

his commitment to the discovery of Hester's paramour) or at least a renewal
of a once-forgotten faith: "My old faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and
explains all that we do, and all that we suffer" (I: 174). Ironically, it is the
resurgence of his dusty faith that leads him on his path of mutual assured
destruction: "It is our fate," he cries. "Let the black flower blossom as it may!"
(I: 174). And it is the suggested apostates—Hester and Dimmesdale—who have
clearly been associated with the Old World and Popery, who suffer from the
machinations of Chillingworth's (who, at this point, begins to sound like
John Endicott) and become his victims.54

Hester's confession is followed by a resounding plea that is pivotal to the
issues at stake here. In a rather nineteenth-century, middle-class rhetorical
flourish, Hester expresses her faith in the future, in the inevitable progress of
(American) culture when she encourages Dimmesdale to seize the wide
world by the shoulders: "15 the world so narrow?" she queries, then exclaims,
"Begin all anew! . . . There is happiness to be enjoyed! There is good to be
done! Exchange this false life of thine for a true one" (I: 197) At this point,
Hester's utopian sentiments are almost amusing. We know, and expect her
to realize, that Dimmesdale isn't going anywhere and her promise of
happiness simply doesn't ring true. At this point, Hester is being less of an
effective performer than a jejune cheerleader. Concluding her
encouragement, Hester utters perhaps the strangest words of the text.
Observing, Chillingworth's nefarious self-creation, Hester imagines
Dimmesdale can do the same, only with more blessed effects. "Preach! Write!
Act! Do anything save to lie down and die! Give up this name of Arthur
Dimmesdale and make thyself another, and a high one, such as thou canst

wear without fear or shame" (I: 198). Why "Act!" we might rightquy ask? In

 

Mm -~-~-- '

232
Hawthorne's world, preaching, acting, and writing seem to be activities

requiring similar talents, and Hawthorne seems to have been interested in
conflating the three activities. Earlier, Hawthorne had referenced clerical and
authorial careers when he made mention of the generations of "priests" who
lived in the old Manse--one of the "priests," of course, being Ralph Waldo
Emerson—and I have suggested that he used his authorial powers to perform
a part in antebellum American. Dimmesdale balks at Hester's
encouragement, exclaiming himself: "O Hester! thou tellest of running a race
to a man whose knees are tottering beneath him! I must die here. There is
not the strength or courage left me to venture into the wide, strange, difficult
world, alone!" but when Hester promises to accompany him on his journey
(mission? apprenticeship?) she inflicts him with perhaps the falsest sense of
security imaginable (I: 198).

The scene in the forest demonstrates the limitations of theatrical selfliood
in Hawthome's fictional world. In Puritan Boston, Hester is able to do a fair
amount of cultural work by subverting the sign and using it as a mask. Yet,
she cannot leave Boston. Hawthorne rhetorically wonders about this in
Chapter V, "Hester at her Needle," when he questions why Hester did not fly
New England and return to her home: . . free to return to her birthplace, or
to any other European land, and there hide her character and identity under a
new exterior, as completely as if emerging into another state of being . . . " (I:
79). For Hawthorne, the answer to the question is simply that we make our
own realities and the world that Hester had made for herself (and which had
also been made for her) was the only one to which she had access. For Hester,
there was a "fatality" to her situation in Boston which compelled her to
"linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked

event has given the color to their lifetime" (I: 79). The move to Boston and

233
the consequential events proved the "stronger assimilation" and she

experienced a "new birth" in the New World. This, of course, is more irony-
in 1850 when everyone else is writing about America as the land of rebirth
from the desiccated English culture, Hawthorne sends over an
Englishwoman to be reborn into a world of fate and doom.

Dimmesdale's confession/ death scene is effected through the tearing away
of his outer garments and the revelation of the self-imposed badge of shame
he wears on his breast. Although he has obscured his guilt beneath his
clerical gown throughout the entire narrative, Dimmesdale's confession and
death are revealed by Hawthorne as a triumph of the spirit against baleful,
mitigating forces. The language Hawthorne uses to represent Dimmesdale's
confession resonates with the opening scene of the novel when Hester
revealed her letter to the public gaze upon her removal from prison.
Dimmesdale, too, metaphorically rescues himself from the prison of his guilt
by revealing his sin in the public sphere:

With a convulsive motion he tore away the ministerial band from
before his breast. It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe
that revelation. For an instant the gaze of the horror-stricken
multitude was concentered on the ghastly miracle; while the minister
stood with a flush of triumph in his face, as one who, in the crisis of
acutest pain, had won a victory. (I: 255)
It is only in unmasking himself that Dimmesdale is able to triumph over his
condition and die a very sentimental death, which Hawthorne enacts in the
finest nineteenth-century fashion. Making his peace with Hester and Pearl,
Dimmesdale manages to explain his plight and his expiration as a
performance illustrative of God's grace. Unlike Hester, Dimmesdale sees no

consecration in their affair. "The law we broke!--the sin here so awfully

234
revealed!" Dimmesdale cries, "Let these alone be in thy thoughts." Yet

Dimmesdale manages to turn his death into a sign of God's mercy, explaining
the trials he has suffered as the agent of his salvation:
God knows; and He is merciful! He hath proved his mercy, most of all,
in my afflictions. By giving me this burning torture to bear upon my
breast! By sending yonder dark and terrible old man, to keep the
torture always at red-heat! By bringing me hither, to die this death of
triumphant ignominy before the people! Had either of these agonies
been wanting, I had been lost for ever! Praised be his name! His will
be done! Farewell! (I: 256)
The catalogue of sufferings enables Dimmesdale to die his death of
"triumphant ignominy" before the public gaze. Even in the revelation of his
sin, though, Dimmesdale is sufficiently ambiguous enough to confuse the
people as to the cause of his passing, the reality of the letter on his breast, and
his relationship with Hester. Hawthorne does not seem to be too concerned
about how the people interpret Dimmesdale's death and the meaning of the
letter on his chest (if we can even believe it exists). In fact, Hawthorne seems
to be amused, even delighted, that the community refuses to see Dimmesdale
for what he is--a sinner just like them. For Hawthorne, the fact that seeing is
inextricably intertwined with ideology is a social dynamic worth celebrating.
The intentions of Dimmesdale's confession collide with the community's
expectations and his words and gestures, rather than exposing his sin, become
(for many) confirmation of his saintliness. Dimmesdale's death, like the
death of Little Eva--that other famous nineteenth-century sufferer—becomes a
Christian conversion experience. He feels good about himself and can die a
noble death because he feels he has revealed his guilt in the public sphere.

Yet, Dimmesdale's confession and death becomes an event needful of

235
interpretation. A part of the public holds the belief that Dimmesdale had

nothing to do with Hester except served as her minister and that, upon
realizing he was dying, decided to turn his death into a "parable" in order to
remind the living that the human condition of fallenness closes the artificial
gap between the saints and the sinners: "It [Dirnmesdale's death] was to teach
them, that the holiest among us has but attained so far above his fellows as to
discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and repudiate more utterly
the phantom of human merit, which would look aspiringly upward" (I: 259).
Hawthorne provides us with a textual world that deals with the problems
of concealing, revealing, and performing in nineteenth-century America. By
1850, the problems of theatrical selfl'iood had become so prevalent that even a
retiring and reticent figure such as Hawthorne was broaching these issues in
his literary discourse. For the performing self/ selves that Hawthorne
presents in his fiction, life is a carnival of masks and charades that are
negotiated between the private realm and public expectations. Like Barnum
and Mowatt, Hawthorne uses theatrical selfhood in his fiction as a literary
device that obscures the self and challenges the possibilities of essential
human nature. More self conscious than Mowatt and Barnum and,
ultimately, more aware of the limitations and potential problems of the
theatrical self in the cultural milieu, Hawthorne expresses his ambivalences
toward the possibilities of malleable selfhood at the same time that he is

stylizing an authorial self.

236
Notes

1Although it is not relevant to my discussion, Fields' description of his
initial discovery that Hawthorne was busily writing a novel which would
become We]; is a wonderful anecdote that is seldom discussed in
Hawthorne scholarship. Following the amusing story of Hawthorne's
attempt to conceal his manuscript from Fields and then his eventual handing
over of the ms. for Fields' perusal, Fields remarks: "However, we soon
arranged for his appearance again before the public with a book" (51).

Zn would not be difficult, of course, to contest Charvat's assumption that the
developing middle classes were without "tradition."

3Charvat goes on to conclude that "The whole Romantic movement in
American may be considered in part as a protest against the new bourgeois."
It's a statement that makes me go, "Hm . . . " as I think about critical studies
such as David Reynolds' beneatthe_Americau_Reuaissance which argues
just the opposite of Charvat's formulation. However, Charvat's idea is not
too different from the kinds of things Michael Davitt Bell is doing in his essay
"Arts of Deception" where he argues that Hawthorne was deviously, even
notoriously, introducing the Romance to America under the guise of
innocuous and conservative pretensions.

4The critical debate over Hawthorne's social and political conservatism or
radicalism is led, on one side, by Sacvan Bercovitch who explains Hawthorne
as a cultural conservative. See Ihe_foice_of_the_S_carlet_Letterand
"Hawthorne's A-morality of Compromise." On the other side, critics such as
Michael Bell argue that Hawthorne intended to subvert the status quo of
antebellum America through the Romances he produced. See "Arts of
Deception."

5Kenneth Dauber takes this formulation a step further, arguing that the
tradition of the American Romance is essentially an adventure in American
autobiography. Explaining his take on Charles Brockden Brown, Dauber
discusses the implications of authorship becoming professionalized in
America: "Rhetoric is replaced by poetics. Autobiography becomes fiction or,
in the case at hand, romance--the tradition of the so-called American
romanceuwhich I see as fiction in the process of a constant return to its lost
autobiographical origins" (xviii).

6For a discussion of Melville's flirtation with Cartesian essences in Moby
Dick, see Rogin, Submsiaefieaealdgy 109.

7A5 Pfister argues, the cultivation of the private self was a gender specific
responsibility that fell to middle class women: "Privatized expectations
compulsively fed upon a nineteenth-century middle-class sentimental
discourse that represented womanhood as a human hearth whose domestic
function was to keep a beleaguered masculinity, chilled in the marketplace,
emotionally warm and psychologically secure" (6).

237

8Pfister notes the irony of Hawthorne penning these tales, which illustrate
the dangers of the conjugal household, in the midst of his blissful
honeymoon.

9See Arlin Turner's biography of Hawthorne (176) for a discussion of
Hawthorne's frustrating attempts at literary production while engaged at the
Custom House.

10See Bell's excellent discussion in "Arts of Deception" regarding the
subversive elements of writing Romance in antebellum America. Also, note
that Emerson, another cultural maverick, expressed his admiration of
Hawthorne's tales for the exact reason most readers of antebellum fiction
distrusted the literary imagination: "N. Hawthorne's reputation as a writer is
a very pleasing fact," Emerson recorded in his journal, "because his writing is
not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man" (quoted in Mellow
205).

11See Charvat, LiterarLFubhshiugmAmenca, especially Chapter Two.

12For the state of American literary history and the a discussion on the
development of authorship from the immediate post-colonial era up through
the Civil War, ee Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America. 1800-
1829-

1(”See Chapter Two of Turner's biography on Hawthorne for a discussion of
his early years.

14*This is an echo from a letter Nathaniel wrote to his mother on 7 March
1820: "Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor or Lawyer? A Minister I
will not be" (XV: 117).

15For a history of the development of literary production in America see

Charvat' s LiteranLEublishiagdaAmerica

16Whitman was tireless (some thought tiresome) in his self promotion. See
Kaplan, especially 21-22, 207-212.

17On high and low culture in antebellum America, see Levine, HighbrourL
Muham-

18The idea of self-promotion was unheard of in the 18205 when Hawthorne
was breaking onto the literary scene. By 1850, however, as we have seen in
the figures of Barnum and Mowatt, promotion of self was imperative to
success in the world of market capitalism. The same was true in the literary

world. See Charvat, IheFrojessiouotAuthorship, Chapters Three and Four.

19Even so, America up until 1850 seemed comfortable with its shallow
literary tradition. In addition to the difficulty that men faced with writing
imaginative fiction, women, as Mary Kelley argues inP riyate Worn man. Public
Stage, experienced similar obstacles: women writing, or stepping out on to
the stage of the public sphere were as notorious as male writers of the
Romance.

20See Mellow (passim) for discussions of Hawthome's shyness in public.

238

21See Bledstein (Chapter Five) on the professionalization of careers in
American culture.

22Hawthorne, of course, wrote Pierce's campaign biography, intending to reap
the benefits of knowing people in high places if Pierce's run was successful.
Following his election, Pierce granted Hawthorne the American Consulship
in Liverpool.

23See Mellow (107-111) for details and circumstances surrounding Cilley's
death.

24For a brief biography of Bridge see Simpson's introduction to Bridge's
Mammal (v-X)-

25Bridge pushed the publication of W by, unbeknownst to
Hawthorne, guaranteeing the publisher, Goodrich, $250 against possible
losses. See Herbert (75) for a discussion of Bridge's role in the publication of
W-

26See Cowley for the sentimental version of Nathaniel's and Sophia's
relationship. See Herbert (passim) for a more penetrating look at the couple's
life together.

27See Hawthorne's letter of 4 October 1840 (XV:494-96).

28See Bell, "Arts of Deception," for a discussion of Melville's more radical
rebellion from the demands of the market on the mid-nineteenth-century
author.

29See Gilmore (85-86) and Mellow (259) on Hawthorne's relationship with
Thoreau.

30See Gilmore (Chapter One) for a discussion of Emerson and the market.

31Baym's ideas begin what seems to have become the central focus for
Hawthorne scholars to this date, namely, whether Hawthorne was a cultural
conservative or whether he challenged the ideological assumptions of his
day.

32See Bell, The Deyelopment of American Romance, especially Chapter One,

for a discussion of the differences between English and American
Romanticism.

33See Millington's excellent discussion of "Passages from a Relinquished
Work" in Chapter Two where he argues that the tale is an attempt by
Hawthorne to present his self to the public.

34See Auerbach (Chapter One) on the nineteenth-century reception of
Shakespeare. See also Lawrence Levine (Chapter One) on the popular
revisions of Shakespeare on the public stage in nineteenth-century America.
35Baym reminds us that the framing of Mosses is similar to Hawthorne's
earlier collection of tales, Ihejtoryteller (a manuscript sent to Goodrich in
1834 that was eventually broken up and published in individual pieces in Ihe
American Monthly Magazine) a series of tales that are linked by the travels
and experiences of a traveling story-teller (39).

36On Sophia's disinclination to leave home, see Herbert 171-77.

239

37See J. Hillis Miller (57) for a discussion on the theme of incommunicable
selfhood in Hawthorne's fiction.

38The Old Manse was built in 1770 by Reverend William Emerson (Ralph
Waldo's father) and next occupied by Reverend Ezra Ripley.

39For a discussion of Hawthome's use of public processions see my essay,
"Stylized Public Processions and the Literary Carnivalesque in the Fiction of
Nathaniel Hawthorne."

40For a critical analysis of antebellum women's fashion see Haltenun,
Chapter Three, "Sentimental Culture and the Problem of Fashion." On
Amelia Bloomer and the effects of her fashion designs on antebellum
Americas, see Banner 86-87, 94-98.

41$ee Sennet (65-70) for a discussion of the use of cosmetics in Elizabethan
England.

42See Banner (36-40) for a brief history of hairdresser establishments in
antebellum America. See Halttunen (84, 86, 161, 163) for discussions of
antebellum hairstyles.

43See Newberry for a discussion of Hawthome's association of Hester with
the Old World through her needlework finery.

44It is important to distinguish between Hawthorne's artistic radicalism (Bell)
and his political conservatism (Bercovitch).

450f all of Hawthorne's literary production, Ihe_$_carlet_Letter is perhaps the
most passionate. He wrote the text in a feverish fit of frustration and sorrow
following his removal from the Custom House and the death of his mother.
Writing to her mother, Sophia reported on Nathaniel's condition at the time:
"He writes immensely. I am almost frightened about it. But he is well and
looks shining" (quoted in Mellow 303). After he completed the novel,
Hawthorne wrote to his friend Bridge and told him that after reading the
final chapters to Sophia, so affected was she that, according to Hawthorne, it
"broke her heart and sent her to bed with a grievous headache--which I look
upon as a triumphant success!" (quoted in Leverenz 263). Later, Hawthorne
would admit that he, too was influenced by the first full reading of the
manuscript recalling that "my emotions when I read the last scene of The
ScarleLLetter to my wife, just after writing it—tried to read it, rather, for my
voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean, as it
subsides after a storm" (quoted in Leverenz 264). Sophia's famous headache
and Nathaniel's unusual display of emotion have been mined by reader-
response critics.

46See Rogin, Submsiyefieuealogy, especially Chapter One.

47See Reynolds, especially Chapter Nine, for a discussion of Hawthorne's
reading of crime literature.

48See Reynolds (118-127) for a discussion of The Scarlet Letter in terms of
popular crime fiction of antebellum America.

240

49A clarification of terms is important here: Ideology is shared patterns of
belief; it is, according to Richard Slotkin, "an abstraction of the system of
beliefs, values, and institutional relationships that characterize a particular
culture or society" (70). Ideology is the force that appropriates a "face" to the
individual in a given society; it sets the parameters for individual behavior
and thought, and provides the subject with a social identity. In a coherent
cultural order, ideology and mythology work in tandem; that is, mythology
collaborates with a culture's dominant ideology. Mythology, "a body of
traditional narratives that exemplifies and historicizes historical ideology,"
then, works as the symbol that delivers meaning to the concepts of ideology

(Slotkin 70). See also Eagleton, Criticismendjdeology and Ideology.

50See my discussion on crime narratives in Chapter One.

510n Hawthorne's representation of alchemy in his fiction see Stich; Swann;
and Luther.

52John Updike, who has re-written W in a trilogy, has made
himself out to be Chillingworth's critical proponent. See his novel, Roger's
Version

53Frederick Newberry has discussed the implications of Dimmesdale's
insistence on wearing vestments of the Anglican faith, observing that in
specifying Dimmesdale's sartorial covering as a "vestment," clerical garb
worn by Anglican priests, Hawthorne does not mean to "transform
Dimmesdale into an Anglican priest but to suggest a mixture of Anglican and
Puritan in him" (240).

54For a discussion of Hester as an icon and her association with Catholicism,
see Newberry 234.

Chapter Five
From the Pulpit to the Platform: Emerson and the
Lamentation of Theatrical Selfhood

My life is for itself and not a spectacle.

--Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson shares none of the theatrical sensibilities of the
figures in this study. Emerson's idealism--his radical individualism and his
insistence that the individual's essential nature could be uncovered--becomes
an obvious critique of the men and women who are the focus of the
preceding essays. Through his essays and lectures, Emerson expounded
jeremiadic warnings concerning the drift of self into fragmentation and
theatricality. Emerson was not impressed with actors and manipulators of
self, encouraging his listeners to "Always scorn appearances, and you always
may," and "Insist on yourself, never imitate" ("Self-Reliance" 59, 83).
Emerson was clearly at odds with the way nineteenth-century Americans
were beginning to perceive themselves in relation to the expanding
industrial, capitalist culture. He was a lone voice of the American nineteenth
century calling for a retreat of the self back from the kind of self-stylization we
saw in the figures of Mowatt, Barnum, and Hawthorne. In one of his journal
entries, Emerson listed Barnum as one of the "Charlatans" of the nineteenth
century (XII: 378) and in another he exclaims that Barnum, along with a host
of other nineteenth-century figures, was no "country[man]" of his (XIV: 334).
Emerson did not celebrate the adorned public men and women who make up

this study and he set himself apart from his contemporaries who were willing

241

242
to accept a fragmented self and use that in order to negotiate their way in a

new world order. Rather than create public personas that catered to the
demands of public expectations and negotiated between public culture and
private needs, Emerson declared that men and women should shuck off the
accouterments of civilization, pay no heed to ideological demands of the
public, and valiantly search for the natural Cartesian essence. "My life is for
itself and not a spectacle," Emerson declared in "Self-Reliance"(53).

In "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," which F.O.
Matthiessen called "probably the most illuminating account of the
intellectual movements of our eighteen-thirties and forties which has yet
been written" (6), Emerson summed up the epistemological undercurrent of
the age, paying close attention to his own mantra of the divinity of the
individual self:

The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware

of itself. There was a new consciousness. The modern mind believed

that the nation existed for the individual, for the guardianship and
education of every man. This idea, roughly written in revolutions and
national movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more
precision; theiudiyidualjs_the_nror1d. (308 my italics)
Like his predecessor, Stephen Burroughs, and his contemporaries, Mowatt,
Barnum, and Hawthorne, Emerson was working out of the liberal tradition of
autonomous individuals free from the authority of the State. Emerson
turned the world of his Fathers, the world of Puritanism and Calvinism,
inside out; he took the prescribed world of the deity that ostensibly lay outside
physical experience and collapsed it into the consciousness of the individual

reality. Instead of reaching outward and upward in a painful state of grace,

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Emerson bore inward—he was a metaphysical mesmerist, Melville called him

a "diver"- in an attempt to reconcile the individual with his or her own self.

In ways he probably would not have been comfortable with, Emerson's
brand of (what Quentin Anderson has called) "secular incarnation" resonates
with the cultural implications of antebellum theatrical selfhood (41).
Emerson's self-reliance and radical individualism suggests a world in which
individual experience becomes the only reality; when the individual creates
his own reality, the parameters of experience, as well as the possibilities of the
theatrical self or the self-stylized persona, are decidedly broadened. The
tension between Emerson's imperial self and the fragmented self of
antebellum America is palpable in the body of his work. For Emerson,
explains Anderson, "the only authority was within . . . [w]e all became actors
and spectators in our private theater" (41). The scions of the past do not play
a part in the development of the individual self. Rather, individuals are
their own fathers and the development of American selfhood is phoenix-like
in its perpetual re-creation. And the nineteenth-century problem of theatrical
selfhood that I am uncovering is related to Emerson's vision of radical
individualism. When the past drops away and the individual claims his or
her subjective reality for the universe, the possibilities of a malleable self
freed from the strictures of State and Church emerges.

Unlike Hawthorne, who saw the necessity of masking until it threatened
the social order, Emerson (who seemed to care little for social cohesion) was
wary of self-stylization. Although Emerson was not interested in negotiation,
masking, or the re-writing of self for ideological purposes, the reality of a
fragmented, theatrical self was so palpable in nineteenth-century America
that even the age's most vociferous challenger of theatrical selfhood found

himself constructing ways to mend what he saw as a cultural crisis. "A man

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may ride alternately on the horses of his private and public nature," he

explained in "Fate," expressing the divided and dynamic nature of self in the
nineteenth century, "as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves
nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one and the
other foot on the back of the other" (47). For Emerson, the fragmentation of
the self was perilous (this is suggested in the image of men throwing
themselves from moving horses) and rather than re-writing self in the
image of public culture, Emerson writes in an attempt to uncover the
"aboriginal self." For Emerson, nineteenth-century men and women such as
Mowatt, Barnum, and Hawthorne "became trapped into continually meeting
expectations that had nothing to do with the way in which he, the inner man,
perceived himself. Forced to develop a public persona with which his private
self could not come to terms, he became a constant spectator of himself"
(Cayton Wm: 225)-

Emerson remained recalcitrant toward the trends of the nineteenth
century because he was never able to reconcile his Coleridgean sense of
Reason and Understanding with the nineteenth-century American notion of
creating reality and meaning through sight.1 In this way, Emerson continued
to separate himself from the epistemological assumptions of his
contemporaries. Distinguishing between perception (Reason and the vision
of the soul) and opinion (the Understanding that facilitates everyday
existence), Emerson argues that the perception never errs—to it "perfect faith
is due" ("Self-Reliance" 65). On the other hand, the "willful actions," or the
Understanding, roves and is unstable ("Self-Reliance" 65). Opposed to the
perception (which, for Emerson, is the only way of Knowing, the only reality
the individual can conceive), Understanding is contingent on the

individual's subject position within a particular culture. In a statement that

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almost seems to be directed at the epistemological structures of seeing and

knowing that someone such as Barnum exploited, Emerson declares in "Self-
Reliance":
Thoughtless people contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as
of opinions, or rather much more readily; for, they do not distinguish
between perception and notion. They fancy that I choose to see this or
that thing. but_perceptiou_is_uouyhimsical,_but_tatal. If I see a trait, my
children will see it after me, and in course of time, all mankind;-
although it may chance that no one has seen it before me. For my
perception of it is as much a fact as the sun. (65 emphasis added)
When Emerson talks of perception as fatal, he means that the perception is
incontrovertible and the effect of individual destiny. Barnum, who thrived
on the exploitation of wtu'msical sight, demonstrated to nineteenth-century
Americans that seeing (or Emerson's Understanding) created meaning, that
perception was a dynamic that was negotiated through Understanding
between the individual and the physical world. For instance, in the
operational aesthetic that Neil Harris sees working in Barnum's sites of
public pleasure, individuals create meaning through interaction with the
various hoaxes that Barnum presented to them. The "Fejee Mermaid," Joice
Heth, and "The Great Buffalo Hunt," as well as nearly every other exhibition
Barnum presented to the American public, were "aesthetic[s] of the
operational," that stemmed from "a delight in observing process and
examining [the ostensible hoaxes] for literal truth" (Humbug 79). "In place of
the spiritual absorption" that was inherent in the vision of Emerson,
"Barnum's exhibitions concentrated on information and the problem of
deception. Onlookers were relieved from the burden of coping with more

abstract problems. Beauty, significance, spiritual values, could be bypassed in

246
favor of seeing what was odd, or what worked, or was genuine" (Humbug 79).

Quite dissimilar from Barnum's way of seeing, the aesthetic operating in the
world view of Emerson was an aesthetic of selfhood, or the delight in
observing and probing into the depths of the aboriginal, spiritual self.
Emerson is arguing that perception, the universal vision of the soul, makes
up the individual's way of seeing and knowing and this cannot be altered or
tainted by the duress of ideological demands or images.

While Mowatt, Barnum, and Hawthorne were experimenting with the
possibilities of theatrical selfhoOd, Emerson was warning about its problems.
Rather than celebrating the creation of a public self, which all of the figures in
this study assiduously attempt, Emerson lamented the apparent mitigation of
the needs of the private self. For Emerson, suppression or expression of the
private nature for the sake of public expectations or exploitations was akin to
a loss of liberty and, at least for the Emerson of "Self-Reliance," this
phenomenon was a product of a burgeoning market economy: "Society is a
joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of
his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the
eater" (49-50). Emerson's insistence on individual nonconformity--perhaps
the pivotal characteristic of Emersonian individualismnfrom the strictures of
the social order is not assimilable into the theatrical manipulations of self
that the figures of this study engage in. In many ways, their negotiations
with public culture seem to have breached Emerson's adage, "Whoso would
be a man must be a nonconforrnist. . . . Nothing is at last sacred but the
integrity of your own min " (50). For Emerson, conformity to the ideological
expectations of public culture is akin to the donning of social masks and veils.
Obedience to institutions and the forms of culture obscures the self: "If you

maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible society, vote with a great

247
party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base

housekeepers,-under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise
man you are" (54). The language here is important: It does not really matter
how the individual performs on the stage of social interaction. Radical or
conservative, Unitarian or Catholic, when the individual pays heed to
external (and hence, artificial) laws and uses them as a mirror for the self,
5 / he veils the essential character of his or her nature. Unlike Hawthorne who
cagily employed discourses of theatrical selfhood in his narratives as a way to
both shroud and introduce his writerly self, Emerson speaks out against the
implications of masking and disguising. Incidentally, here Emerson is
carrying on a discourse of the artificial construction of authority that the
Founding Fathers struggled with as they broke from England and attempted
to set up a social order that appeared to derive straight from the natural order
of things but that, to their knowledge and fear, was no less artificial than the
monarchy from which they were removing themselves.2 By the second
quarter of the nineteenth century, though, the discussion has moved from
the problem of the artificiality of institutional hierarchies to the question of
whether the individual self owes allegiance to the forms of culture and
society.

As the preceding essays suggest, the figures of this study demonstrate that
Emersonian thinking may have been slightly outside the experience and
possibilities of many nineteenth-century Americans. Emersonian radical
individualism--the belief in the essential nature of an aboriginal self--is
implicitly muted and questioned in the lives and literary discourses of the
three figures of this study. Each engage in his or her own brand of radical
individualism, but it is one far removed from the Emersonian ideal. For

Mowatt, Barnum, and Hawthorne, self-reliance is about the ever-changing

248
aspects of the aboriginal self and the ability of the individuals to negotiate

their way through the ideological expectations of public culture. More
interested in the possibilities of malleable selves, none seem too concerned
about uncovering Emerson's core self unless it is for the sole purpose of
presenting a stylized persona to the public. Mowatt's experience is especially
important here. Unlike Barnum, and even Hawthorne, who gleefully delight
in their expression of theatrical selfhood, Mowatt engages in the dynamics of
masking and veiling the private self in the public realm as a way to survive
the ideological expectations of what it meant to be a middle-class woman
acting on the public stages of antebellum America. The cultural paradox here
is, of course, glaring because the Emersonian world view of self-reliance and
individualism has come to signify the core of the creation of an American
national identity. As encouraging as statements such as "What I must do is
all that concerns me, not what the people think" are, they fail to ring true for
the individuals of the preceding essays ("Self Reliance" 53).

On the Stump: Emerson as a Public Figure
On 18 January 1866 a citizen of Rock Island, Illinois, eager to enjoy a

pleasant evening on the ice might have been surprised to see the following
notice tacked outside the local skating rink:

Emerson lectures tonight

Go to Babcock's Hall. There will be no skating. (quoted in Scott 84)
Considering the development of Emerson's career--from the pulpit to the
platform—and his engagement with antebellum public culture it would seem
the Boston Brahmin would have been more amenable to the stylized

presentation of self. Emerson began his career in 1826 as a Unitarian minister

249
who preached the inspired word of God to his parishioners. When Emerson

died in 1882, he had become one of the most popular lecturers in America.

In 1832, six months after the death of his first wife, Emerson resigned his
pastorate, sailed for Europe and, upon his return, gave his first lecture, "The
Uses of Natural History," in Boston on 5 November 1833. Emerson began his
first lecture series in 1835 and consistently appeared in lyceum lecterns across
the country until 1876. Throughout the years, Emerson would energetically
take to the Lyceum trail in late fall, endure the demands and discomforts of
nineteenth-century travel, and not return to Concord until the early spring.
From 1850 until the late 18705 he traveled to Boston, Cincinnati, Baltimore,
Philadelphia, and went as far south as Charlottesville, Virginia.

Throughout the 18505 and 18605 his lecturers were public events—in Rock
Island in 1856, he was advertised in the local newspaper as "the Celebrated
Metaphysician" (quoted in Scott 80), and one enterprising midwestern town
scheduled a social dance after one of Emerson's lectures-"Tickets to Emerson
and ball, one dollar"-read the public advertisement in the local newspaper
(quoted in McAleer 498).3 By the 18505, Emerson had become a popular
public figure and had effectively transferred his oratorical skill from the
explication of the Divine Will to the exhortation of the divinity within the
individual soul. Freed from the constraints and limitations of institutional
religion, Emerson enjoyed the liberties of expressing his ideas of radical
individualism as well as his observations on nineteenth-century culture.

Emerson celebrated the intellectual freedoms the lyceum would afford.
When he informed his brother of his decision to leave the ministry he
commented: "I have relinquished my ecclesiastical charge at E. Lexington 8:
shall not preach more except from the Lyceum. . . . My pulpit is the Lyceum

platform" (quoted in McAleer 292). Emerson continued to make connections

250 .
between his life in the pulpit and on the platform: to his friend Thomas

Carlyle Emerson would confess "I find myself so much more and freer on the
platform of the lecture-room than in the pulpit, that I shall not much more
use the last" (quoted in McAleer 291). In a journal entry from 1856, Emerson
highlighted the relationship between the pulpit and the platform when he
wrote, "I look upon the Lecture-room as the true church of to-day, and as the
home of a richer eloquence than Faneuil Hall or the Capitol ever knew"
(quoted in Matthiessen 23).

In light of the ostensible freedoms the American revolution provided for
the individual self, it is surprising how radical Emerson's early lectures and
essays were taken to be. Consider the famous Divinity School Address of
1838, where he told Harvard's old-guard that their Sunday sermons were less
interesting than a passing snowstorm. The commotion that the Divinity
Address elicited suggests that the autonomous self was still a problem in
antebellum America and that the dictates of the Church, at least in New
England, prescribed the workings of the soul and mind. Curiously, however,
as Emerson's career progressed and he gradually carved a niche out for
himself as America's most popular and famous lyceum speaker, his
reputation as a literary maverick was re-shaped and by the 18505, Emerson
was enjoying the pubic adulation of Boston's blue-bloods as well as the
respect of the midwest's pioneering spirits. His movement, then, from the
pulpit to the platform, seems to suggest that Emerson, despite his suspicion of
the public realm, profited from an increasing acceptance of the theatrical self.

Emerson was sought out by local communities throughout the east and
midwest and he made a lucrative living parading from one lyceum lectern to
the next. His first excursion to the midwest in May of 1850 netted profits of
$560 for a three week stint in Cincinnati (McAleer 494). The following

251
excerpt from his journals suggests that the profit motive was keen in

Emerson's mind as he trudged from lectern to lectern throughout the cold
winter months:
'Twas tedious, the squalor and obstructions of travel; the advantage of
their offers at Chicago made it necessary to go; in short, this dragging of
a decorous old gentleman out of home and out of position to this
juvenile career was tantamount to this,-"I'll bet you fifty dollars a day
that you will not leave your library, and wade and ride and run and
suffer all manner of indignities and stand up for an hour each night
reading in a hall"; and I answered, "I'll bet I will." I do it and win the
$900. (W15 310)
But Emerson was equally concerned with uplifting the popular imagination
and consciousness as he was with making a dollar. To Carlyle, Emerson
would explain his role as a public lecturer in the following terms: "There are
in this country so few scholars, that the services of each studious person are
needed to do what he can for the circulation of thoughts, to the end of
making some counterweight to the money force, and to give such food as he
may to the nigh starving youth" (quoted in Thorp 21). Emerson did not see
himself as a popular entertainer, creating sites of public pleasure. Rather, the
Boston Brahmin was interested in challenging his audiences to think for
themselves as well as bringing culture to the hinterlands of the republic. In
his journals, Emerson expressed his hope that audiences came "to think, not
to be entertained," and envisioned the lecture as "a few reasonable words to
keep us in mind of truth amidst our nonsense" (XII: 82).
Year after year, Emerson endured his lecture tours through the States,
making money and enjoying the sights and the people he met along the way.

But it is not clear why his audiences came to see Emerson, nor is it apparent

252
that the audiences enjoyed their time listening to the sage. The following

announcement for an Emerson lecture is tantamount to the way Emerson
was received before the general public: "He is stuffed with knowledge on all
sorts of subjects. He is an immense man, and we hope those who hear him
to-night will understand him" (quoted in Mead 47). The advertiser's "hope"
that audiences will comprehend Emerson's esoteric flights of the intellect
suggest that, unlike Barnum and Mowatt whose fame was contingent upon
their abilities to entertain the general public, Emerson became a public figure
by confusing and oftentimes agitating his audiences. Emerson, in short, was
the nineteenth-century's "Man Thinking," rather than wo/man acting or
exhibiting in the public sphere. A typical review of an Emerson lecture
generally expressed mystification. One reviewer admitted, "In the
multiplicity of paradoxes which abounded in the lecture, it was hard to tell
what Mr. E said or what he meant" (quoted in Mead 42). Accounts of Emerson
speaking talk about the sweetness and power of his voice and the charming
habit he had of grabbing on to the lectern and softly raising up on the balls of
his feet. Audiences were enchanted by his deep and musical voice and by his
quiet and gracious manners.4
Despite (because of?) their difficulty, Emerson's lectures were perceived as
performances by his audiences. Consider the remarks of the London
publisher, John Chapman:
It was the platform which determined Emerson's style. He was not a
writer, but a speaker. On the platform his manner of speech was a
living part of his words. The pauses and hesitation, the abstraction, the
searching, the balancing, the turning forward, and back of the leaves of
his lecture, and then the discovery, the illumination, the gleam of

lightning which you saw before your eyes descend into a man of

253
genius--all this was Emerson. He invented this style of speaking.

(quoted in McAleer 486)
But beyond his mannerisms and gestures, audiences were miffed by the
contents and lack of organization in an Emerson lecture. Even Lowell, who
probably understood Emerson better than most, said, "We do not go to hear
what Emerson says so much as we go to hear Emerson" (45). Emerson's
lectures performed a very different kind of cultural work than Barnum's
public extravaganzas and Mowatt's theatrical performances; in fact, an
Emerson lecture managed to irritate and confuse members of his audiences as
much as it entertained others. Reviews of an Emerson lecture are wildly
diverse ranging from ecstatic appeal to bald-faced frustration to abject
misunderstanding. For instance, Lowell could celebrate the peaceful effects
an Emerson lecture could have on his audience. Recounting Emerson's
lecture at the Robert Burns centenary dinner in 1858, Lowell recalled:
Every sentence brought down the house, as I never saw one brought
down before. . . . I watched, for it was an interesting study, how the
quick sympathy ran flashing from face to face down the long tables, like
an electric spark thrilling as it went, and then exploded in a thunder of
plaudits. I watched till tables and faces vanished, for I, too, found
myself caught up in the common enthusiasm, and my excited fancy set
me under the bema listening to him who fulmined over Greece. (49)
Other reviews, although they laud Emerson's style, suggest that an Emerson
lecture subjected audiences to a certain sense of pain and emptiness. Consider
the following excerpt from a review of Emerson's lecture that appeared in the
bostorLIourual: "There is no other man in America who can, by the mere
force of what he says, enthrall and dominate an audience. Breathless

attention is given, although now and then his voice falls away so that those

254
seated farthest off have to strain every nerve to catch the words. . . . The

emphatic New Englander listens, incredulously at first, but finishes by saying,
"That's so!" (quoted in McAleer 586). The language of the review is curiously
cryptic and ambivalent. Comprehension of Emerson's meaning seems
elusive and attention is focused on the absence of meaning rather than its
presence: The audience gives "breathless" attention and those in the back
struggle to hear because Emerson's voice is prone to "fall away." "Strain[ing]"
their "nerves," that audience hangs on to catch the elusive words falling from
Emerson's tongue. And if audiences walked away from an Emerson lecture
with any clear ideas, they were often quite dissimilar from Emerson's own
world view. Consider the words of one of Emerson's listeners, a young
woman who after hearing one of his lectures declared, "Oh, how deeply do
the word and the presence of such a man as Emerson make us feel the utter
insignificance, the great inferiority, of ourselves" (quoted in Bode, American
Lyceum 222). Emerson, of course, who in "Self-Reliance" would declare, "In
every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back
to us with a certain alienated majesty," would have been horrified by this
statement, yet who can gainsay what the individual took away from the
lecture?

Unlike the "operational aesthetic" which served as the operative principle
behind Barnum's creation of sites of public pleasure, Emerson's lectures were
too abstruse for most audience members to pull apart, criticize, and make his
or her own.5 Perhaps more than any other nineteenth-century figure,
Barnum was successful in creating sites of public pleasure in the expanding
market economy. Barnum found forms of culture that appealed to a newly
developing mass culture and catered to their changing need throughout his

long career. Emerson, on the other hand, hardly instilled his audiences with

255
the ease and enjoyment that followed a performance by Jenny Lind, or a night

in Barnum's Lecture Room. Lowell was amused by the apparent inability of
audiences to understand Emerson: "What they do not fully understand they
take on trust, and listen . . . " (43). Even George Santayana, the famous
American philosopher, understood the gap in understanding between
Emerson and his audiences: "His friends and neighbors, the congregations he
preached to in his younger days, the audiences that afterward listened to his
lectures, all agreed in a veneration for his person which had nothing to do

with their understanding or acceptance of his opinions" (quoted in Porte 17).

Emerson and his Audiences: Confirming and Challenging

Because of the many different voices and attitudes Emerson expressed over
the course of his career--a different "Emerson" appears in each lecture, essay,
and poem-~and because of the cultural confusion that an Emerson lesson
could inflict on its audiences, Emerson scholars have spent a good deal of
time debating whether his literary production finally confirmed or challenged
the nascent capitalist society in which it was produced. In a chapter in
RepresentatiyLMan aptly entitled, "The Protest," Joel Porte has pointed to
essays such as "The Protest" and the "Divinity Address," in addition to his
outspoken condemnation of the removal of the Cherokees from Mississippi
in 1838, as evidence that Emerson remained opposed to the social and
political trends of his time. In an adamant passage directed toward any critic
who dares think of Emerson as a lackey for the developing consumer culture,
Porte states, "The view of Emerson as a shallow optimist who approved of, or
indeed helped inspire, the mindless boosterism or go-getting spirit so
frequently associated with mid-nineteenth-century America is as false to

Emerson as it is to our national character" (140). Here, the reader is shown a

256
progressive and cavalier Emerson who stood on the margins of society. On

the other hand, Michael Gilmore has explicated some of Emerson's essays
and demonstrated Emerson's "drift toward conservatism" (19). For Gilmore,
"Nature" becomes a pivotal text in the Emerson corpus, representing the
trend in his thinking from the rather radical stance of "Wealth" and "The
Transcendentalist" and toward a reconciliation with the aggressive capitalist
impulse. By the end of his career, according to Gilmore, Emerson had come
full circle, essays such as "Compensation" and the longer work, W
oLLfie, suggesting that self-reliance and radical individualism are exercised in
the marketplace rather than the fields of the yeoman farmer (30-34).

None of these views of Emerson as conservative or radical acknowledges
the complexity of cultural studies that I have been stressing through the
preceding essays.6 The scholarly debate about whether Emerson was a
conservative or radical voice in American culture generally misses its mark.
Emerson was both conservative and radical. Like Barnum, Mowatt, and
Hawthorne, he confirmed and challenged dominant ways of thinking. What
is more important here is the idea that Emerson performed cultural work in
his society according to the manner in which his listeners and readers created
meaning through the consumption of his intellectual wares. The interplay
between Emerson and his audience must be considered in order to see the
kind of cultural work Emerson did in nineteenth-century America. Unaware
of the idea that cultural meaning is created somewhere between the
expressions of the stage and the ideological assumptions of the public
audience, most scholars have focused primarily on Emerson's texts in their
efforts to talk about Emerson as a radical or a conservative. This

methodology is less than satisfying, however, because it fails to accommodate

257
the assumption that individual voices are heard according to their position

within the ideological framework of the audience.

Although her scholarship tends to suggest a Marxian dialectic/ consensus
school interpretation between the interplay of marginal and hegemonic
groups, Mary Kupiec Cayton's essay, "The Making of an American Prophet,"
comes closest to explaining the dynamic of meaning created between
Emerson and his audience. In an excellent methodological introduction,
Cayton explains her Bakhtinian-based reception theory of the American
intellectual tradition, stressing that "[t]he intellectual discourse that emerges
from a given culture is made not by 'great men' who transcend the
conditions of their age but by communities of listeners who define 'discourse
conventions' and by the intellectuals to whom they choose to listen" (598).
Cayton outlines a program of reception theory/ cultural studies that I have
been explaining through the preceding essays: "[I]f historians view
intellectual discourse as, in large part, a product of audience construction,
then the ideas of individual intellectuals aLflrLaudieucheoeiyethem
culturally become an arena in which historians can examine the conflicts
between social groups over the hegemonic making of meaning for that
culture" (598, emphasis in original).

In an effort to demonstrate the gaps in understanding between Emerson's
audiences and the actual language he employed in his works, Cayton
examines an excerpt from a lecture Emerson gave in Cincinnati in 1852 and
compares it to an interpretation of the lecture that appeared in the local
newspaper the following day. Consider the following summary of Emerson's
lecture, "Wealth," which appeared in the Cincinnati Gazette in December of
1852:

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One of the most natural enquiries about a person, but partially known,

was "what has been his success in life?" The first question asked with
regard to a stranger is, "WW?" All men are
consumers, and all ought to be producers. Man is an expensive animal
and ought to be rich. Wealth has its source in the application of mind
to nature. . . . The art of getting rich consists, not in industry, but in
being at the right spot for such getting, and in the right application of
forces. . . . (612)

Now consider the following passage from "Wealth" (also reprinted in

Cayton's essay):

As soon as a stranger is introduced into any company, one of the first
questions which all wish to have answered, is, How does that man get
his living? And with reason. He is no whole man until he knows
how to earn a blameless livelihood. Society is barbarous until every
industrious man can get his living without dishonest customs.

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He fails to
make his place good in the world unless he not only pays his debt but
also adds something to the common wealth. nor can he do justice to
his genius without making some larger demand on the world than a
bar subsistence. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.
(612)

The reviewer's notions on the "art of getting rich," and his efforts to embed
Emerson's ideas in a material construct demonstrates how he has channeled
Emerson's rhetoric through his own ideological assumptions concerning the
blessings and promise of a consumer culture. As Cayton illustrates, the
reviewer clearly misses the metaphorical use of pivotal words such as

"wealth" and "riches," forgetting Emerson's Platonic obsession with using

259
objects and language as suggestions of the transcendendant ideal. The

reviewer has grounded his summary in a material interpretation of
Emersonian thinking, turning the lecture in a "how-to," inspirational
message on the wonder of technological advances and the inevitable progress
of the capitalist venture.7 Most striking, perhaps, is the reviewers apparent
ignorance of the final two sentences of the first paragraph--a "blameless
livelihood" and the notion of a society without "dishonest customs" is
outside the forces of articulation of this reviewer. Yet, in the cultural context,
who can blame the reviewer for his "ignorance"? He effectively turns
Emerson's lecture into a "how-to" performance because that was the primary
function of the Lyceum series. Antebellum public culture was greedy for
public discourses that explained the physical mysteries and mechanical
properties of their world as well as provided methods of self-improvement.
"The language of technical explanation and scientific description itself,"
explains Harris, "had become a form of recreational literature by the 18405 and
18505. Newspapers, magazines, even novels and short stories catered to this
passion for detail. Manuals on almost every conceivable activity poured forth
from American presses" (Humbug 75). If the medium is the message, it
should be no shock that this particular reviewer searches for discourses on
self-irnprovement and ways to get ahead in the market world in Emerson's
lecture.

It is tempting to read Emerson's lectures and essays from the 18505 until
the time of his death as discourses confirming a sentimental and a capitalist
social order. His refusal to experiment with theatrical selfhood and his
jeremiads against fragmentation of self make him out to be less outrageous,
and much more cautious than the other figures of this study. Surprisingly,

his demands for the uncovering of an essential self removed from social

260
corruption and influence seems much more assimilable into the Sentimental

idea of selfhood than the experimental theatrical selfhood that the other
figures in this study were employing in the stylized presentation of their own
public selves. As Cayton points out, the real irony of Emerson's career as a
lecturer was that, despite the fundamentally different way he saw the world
compared to someone like P.T. Barnum (who was also a renowned lecturer),
by the 18505 Emerson's lectures were doing the very same kind of cultural
work that Barnum was doing in the confirmation of a commercial culture
(614). Perhaps it was the esoteric and abstruse nature of Emerson's lectures
and essays that contributed to the ostensible co-option of his rhetoric and the
critical opinion of Emerson's conservatism.

Emerson "worked" at mid-century because something in his rhetoric
appealed to the audiences who were coming to hear him speak-~even if they
could not understand him. Yet it seems short-sighted to suggest that
Emerson had become an uncritical or unabashed exponent of consumer
culture. Public meaning from Emerson's lectures was created somewhere
between the intentionality of Emerson's speeches and the assumptions his
audiences brought to his lectures. Emerson became a commodity on the
market of a nascent American intellectual culture and, as we know, all
markets are driven by public demand. Yet public demand is malleable and
open for manipulation and influence from certain individuals and groups.
Lowell speaks of the intellectual challenges Emerson posed to his listeners,
suggesting that Emersonian rhetoric challenged listeners to search for
possibilities outside of their little worlds and seek meaning in places they
might not have looked without Emerson's promptings. "Did our own
imaginations transfigure dry remainder-biscuit into ambrosia?" Lowell

rhetorically asks. "At any rate," he continues, "he brought us life, which, on

261
the whole, is no bad thing" (460). As the same time, McAleer's description of

Boston's blue-bloods gathering on Monday afternoons to hear the predictable
and confirmatory rhetoric of Emerson suggests that a good number of
Emerson's listeners came to hear him confirm their own positions and places
in the world (586). And finally, both were right, because Emerson's rhetorical
flourishes and constructions were so ambiguous, so open-ended, that
interpretation lay almost solely in possibilities that the individual listener

could cull from the lecture.

Emerson and the (continuing) Problem of Antebellum Theatrical Selfhood

In "Self Reliance" and "Experience," Emerson demonstrates that the
problem of American selfhood is still evident in the cultural discourse of the
mid-nineteenth century. Emerson scholars have talked about the two
different versions of the world that Emerson provides in perhaps his most
famous essays, "Self-Reliance" and "Experience." It is certainly clear that
"Self-Reliance," with its idealistic assertions of radical individualism,
contrasts with the somber, oftentimes gloomy tone of "Experience." While
both essays provide different explanations regarding the essential nature of
selfhood, both take up the problem and lament the possibilities of a
fragmented self divorced from its aboriginal essence.

In its implicit argument that the self can and should be a coherent whole,
"Self-Reliance" represents Emerson's greatest challenge to the idea of
fragmented selfhood and his boldest" efforts to heal the breaches between
public and private selves. Cayton suggests that "Emerson outlines in his
essay a plan for restoring the individual to wholeness within a mass culture.

The true self, Emerson claims, is not the self who artificially gives himself

over to public opinion, but rather the private self, who is the locus of thought

262
and feeling" (Emerson'sfimergeuce 228). For the Emerson of "Self-Reliance,"

the nascent consumer culture and the development of a nineteenth-century
mass culture threatens the integrity of the individual self. Emerson believed
in an essential core being and he contended that self fragmentation resulted
from the individual moving away from an understanding of its essences. For
Emerson, who loved to challenged the limitations of language, selfishness is
a disregard for the inner self and an overloaded concern for the material,
physical body. Emerson encouraged people to be less selfish and more self-
ish. The selfish man has not thought of his self enough: "Very likely," notes
Mary Kupiec Cayton, "he is so utterly unacquainted with himself, has lived so
on the outside of his world, that he does not yet believe in its existence"
(Fmersou'sjmergeuce 229). For Emerson, individuals are fragmented and
alienated from their essential being, but that is an unnatural state that can be
improved through the uncovering of the undivided conscious of Nature.

In "Self-Reliance" Emerson asks "[W]hat is the aboriginal Self, on which
a universal reliance may be grounded?" and answers with a resounding
affirmation of the eternal unity and connectedness of all things (63). For the
Emerson of "Self-Reliance," there is an original source, "the essence of
genius, of virtue, and of life" and a "deep force" where "all things find their
common origin" (64). Emerson begins his darkest essay, "Experience"
(written after the death of his five year-old son, Waldo), with a similar
question, but provides an answer that is perhaps the most disquieting passage
in the corpus of American literature: "Where do we find ourselves?"
Emerson rhetorically queries and replies that we find ourselves midway on a
flight of stairs and we know neither what lies ahead or where we have come
from. But the inquiry goes beyond the metaphor of spatial location and can

be read as a more haunting inquiry into the nature of selfhood (45). With the

263
optimism of "Self-Reliance" deflated, Emerson seems to be asking where, if

not in the essential core of individuality, can the self be located: "Where do
we find our selves?" he might have asked. Emerson begins "Self-Reliance"
with a rousing, almost intoxicated, celebration of individual genius: "To
believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private
heart is true for all men,-that is genius" (45). But "Experience," the essay
conceived on the morning after the feast and celebration of the triumph of
individuality, begins with a retreating tone, a questioning of the night's
revelries: "But the Genius which according to the old belief stands at the door
by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales,
mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at
noonday" (45).

Emerson continues his query into the complexities of American selfhood
with a metaphor that looks forward to the existential void that would be
uncovered by modern European philosophers of the twentieth century.
Stranded in the chasm of existence, Emerson searches for elements of
sustenance, but wonders if perhaps the eternal and universal waters have not
been shut down, or diverted to another source: "We are like millers on the
lower levels of a stream, when the factories above them have exhausted the
water. We too fancy that the upper people must have raised their dams"
("Experience" 46).

With "Experience," Emerson rethinks the previous assertions of the self as
part of a natural unified network and beckons toward a view that the
subjectivity of experience was probably the only reality worth talking about.
The retreating and reconciling tone of "Experience" contrasts with the former
optimism of "Self-Reliance" and remained the scope of Emerson's addresses

and essays until the end of his life: "If we cannot make voluntary and

264
conscious steps in the admirable science of universals let us see the parts

wisely, and infer the genius of nature from the best particular with a
becoming charity" (83). Consider Ihe_Couduct_of_Life (1860) and "Society and
Solitude" (1870) where Emerson contents himself with discourses on the
mundane, rather than grapples with broader questions of existence as he did
in his earlier essays. And in the work that Emerson produced throughout
the rest of his life, he maintained this tone of retreat from universals,
contenting himself and his audiences with inquiries, lectures, and essays on
the particulars of life rather than searching out the grand continents of
meaning. The metaphysical problems of self and society addressed in earlier
essays such as "Self-Reliance" (1841) and "Circles" (1841) are considerably
watered down in essays such as "Behavior" and "Culture," from Ihe_Couduct
oLLife, and "Domestic Life" and "Farming" from W.

In "Experience," Emerson seems to accept the reality of dynamic SElthOd
that fails to connect back to Nature. Consider Emerson's powerful insistence
of the transformative possibilities of the human soul as expressed in "Self-
Reliance": "This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that
forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a
shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally
aside. Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is
present, there will be power not confident but agent" (69). In the world of
"Experience," however, where the connection to the universal oversoul ("the
ever-blessed One") has been questioned, even severed, and where Judas and
Jesus part company, the transformative powers of the individual soul are left
to free-float and become subjected to the possibilities of theatrical, stylized
selfhood. In the world of "Experience" the self has been loosened from its

universal threads and is subject to the possibilities and potentials of theatrical

265
selfhood. Emerson's nod toward the possibilities of a theatrical self is far from

flippant and celebratory-~the jeremiad continues and Emerson laments the
passing of the innocence of "Self-Reliance" and gravely nods toward the
evanescence and mutability of self and individual relations. When Emerson
declares "There is an optical illusion about every person we meet," he is
lamenting the reality of the theatrical self that someone such as Barnum
celebrated (52). Recall Barnum's statement that ironically resonates with
Emerson's: "Put on the appearance of business and generally the reality will
follow" (Life 394). "Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise,
reality, Subjectiveness,--these are thread on the loom of time, these are the
lords of life," Emerson cries near the end of the essay (82). Emerson's vision
enabled him to see through the nineteenth century's inclination to create
meaning through sight rather than critical thinking. Still, when close to the
end of "Experience" Emerson declares, "We live amid surfaces, and the true
art of life is to skate well on them," he enigmatically acknowledges, perhaps
even accepts a point of view that all of the figures of this study almost
unthinkingly propound (59).

Finally, and just before the final rhetorical flourish where Emerson digs for
the old optimism of "Self-Reliance" ("up again, old heart! . . . there is victory
yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize will
be the transformation of genius into practical power"), he acknowledges the
fragmentation of his own existence, declaring, "I know better than to claim
any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of

me" (83).

266
Notes

1See my discussion at the conclusion of chapter 4.
2See the discussion in Chapter Four.

3On Emerson's midwestern tours of the 18505 and 18605, see Wasung;
Hastings; Schorer; Scott; and Thorp.

4Emerson must have been seductive on the platform. The first time his
second wife, Lidian, saw Emerson he was delivering a sermon in Boston and
according to McAleer, she, sitting next to the pulpit, was sent into a "catatonic
state of immobility" (201) by his power of expression. After the service, Lidian
was said to have exclaimed, "That man is certainly my predestined husband"
(quoted in McAleer 201).

5According to Neil Harris in Chapter Three of Humbug, the "operational
aesthetic" of Barnum's exhibits was a democratic form of mass
entertainment that afforded the viewer the opportunity of deciphering the
innerworkings of the hoax or exhibit that Barnum displayed before the public.

6I have benefited from reading Mary Kupiec Cayton's cogent and thoughtful
historical explanation of Emerson, his audience, and the creation of cultural
meaning. See the opening remarks of "The Making of an American Prophet"
where she provides a theoretical discussion of cultural discourse and
audience construction of meaning (598).

7See Cayton's full discussion on the apparent differences between the
reviewers interpretations and Emerson's ostensible meaning (612-13).

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