Moral revolutions: Ethics and skepticism in antebellum New England literary culture, 1846--1859 (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville)

What values should guide ethical action? And how much difference does such morally ambitious behavior make in the world? For Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, these were urgent questions. While New England literary culture in the mid-nineteenth century had a strong belief in the meaningfulness and power of human agency, the ends to which autonomy was to be directed were not always so clear. In the uncertainty in deciding which form virtue was to take, these writers were struggling with a characteristic problem of Enlightenment ethical philosophy. Working in the tradition of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, the dissertation explores a vigorous---even bitter---conflict over ethical ideals among writers from relatively similar backgrounds. In addition to contradicting one another, the literary works under discussion critically analyze their own ethical system. The combined force of the books suggests that the powerfully competing ethical systems of disinterested benevolence and romantic individualism devised in the setting of the New England village no longer seemed adequate to the challenges of existence in a rapidly-industrializing, politically-divided nation in which the moral authority of Christian orthodoxy had waned. Uncle Tom's Cabin dramatizes the virtue of disinterested benevolence and the evil of slavery, but also expresses ambivalence about how much human volition can accomplish in a world suffused with sin. Thoreau's Walden presents idealist ethics as its official doctrine, but also moves uncertainly toward a new form of decentered consciousness in response to frustrations with emotional dissociation and with Emersonian epistemology. Hawthorne disdains both disinterested benevolence and romantic individualism in favor of ethical friendship, before concluding that his ideal of a "friend of friends" is a purely literary projection. Melville offers the most thoroughgoing attack on the ethical possibilities of his culture in Pierre, with his double-sided critique of benevolence serving as an index of his desperate agnosticism. In spite of great differences in doctrine, the authors all turned to imaginative writing to grapple with the possibilities and limitations of ethical action. Writing a book about ethics served as a symbolic resolution to problems that resisted easy solution in life.