Acts of recovery: American antebellum fictions

"Acts of Recovery: American Antebellum Fictions" examines the way New England writers---especially Hawthorne and Melville, but also some less celebrated contemporaries---negotiate their generation's most acutely felt pressures: the national crises of individualism accompanying the radical economic fluctuations of the new market economy, and an associated tension between the nation's revolutionary rhetoric and ominous social reality. I make such transactions visible by setting the work of these authors against a background of texts, events, and artifacts of a kind that have typically eluded memory and history. The first chapter describes the Puritan magistrates' messy adjudication of Hester Prynne's indiscretion with Arthur Dimmesdale as the central anxiety of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), and then contextualizes that anxiety within a history of bitter juristic and electoral contests familiar to the 1840s. The second chapter examines how literature affiliated with a mid-nineteenth-century speculative bubble in exotic poultry---a hoax that inspires Melville's "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!" (1853)---suggests a connection between antebellum fears regarding market-driven self-fashioning and racial and literary hybridity. The third chapter is instigated by a joke found in an 1852 number of the English humor magazine Punch that links the "honest sham" of humbug, as popularized by P. T. Barnum, to the inherent dishonesties of slavery. While this makes for a volatile instance of cultural criticism, the figurative regime upon which it depends finally undermines its reformist agenda in ways that speak to the ambiguities of antislavery rhetoric as it was being deployed by Harriet Beecher Stowe and others. The last chapter proposes that Melville's "Benito Cereno" (1855) is more alert to the voyage narrative that was its inspiration than has been realized, and that the real Delano's vexed relationship to the mutiny on the H.M.S. Bounty, a matter to which a considerable amount of his Narrative (1817) is devoted, provides a vital context for reckoning the ultimate aim of Melville's appropriation of Delano's story. In sum, these acts of recovery are mindful of but not distracted by irreconcilable theoretical arguments about "intention" and "reception," and, in complicating familiar assumptions about antebellum cultural production, demonstrate the value of archival approaches to literature.