| Despite the nation's foundational opposition to systems of hereditary privilege, a pervasive view of American identity in the nineteenth-century was that shared ancestry united white citizens across geographical and ideological divides. Particularly in the period of profound discord preceding the Civil War and through the insufficient Reconstruction that followed, calls for sectional unity characteristically utilized the naturalizing paradigm of white kinship. Beyond the realm of metaphor, concerns about the nation's survival inspired persistent anxiety about this vital domain's endangerment, decline, or incursion from outsiders. The American family served as both the symbol and the tool of an American nationalism centered in white supremacy.;In spite of this widespread political exaltation of kinship, many nineteenth-century Americans held that the preoccupation with family identity in the United States detracted from the aims of republican government. This project identifies a tradition of American literature that rejects the intertwining of citizenship with kinship, exposing blood-based conceptions of community to be not only exclusionary but also ontologically incoherent. I highlight this oppositional strategy in fifty years of social protest fiction that imagines the decline of the white American family and the social order it supports.;This study offers a new framework for reading representations of kinship in the nineteenth-century American novel, departing from the previous critical focus on domesticity and sentiment to theorize an intensified concern with the political implications of the family, its composition, governance, and reproductive capacity beginning around 1850. Relying primarily on historicist methodology but also drawing from critical theories of race, nationalism, sexuality, and the family, chapters include readings of works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Wells Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna E. Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Pauline Hopkins. |
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