Dissensus Communis: Conservatism, Skepticism, and Sympathy in the American Renaissance

Challenging the long-held assumption that the early American literary and cultural imagination was ineluctably liberal in political orientation, this dissertation aims at tracing a genealogy of conservative thought throughout antebellum American letters---an anti-capitalist, communitarian tradition of conservatism skeptical about liberal individualism and perfectionism. Looking in particular at the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Frank J. Webb, the project demonstrates that far from being universally championed, the ascendant liberal tradition in America was frequently contested during the American Renaissance. In so doing, it seeks to step outside the logic of liberal consensus that has long dominated the study of classic American literature, from the Myth and Symbol scholarship of the Cold War era to the identitarian and transnational scholarship of the current neoliberal era.;Chapter One investigates the eighteenth-century tradition of Common Sense philosophy out of which early national and antebellum American conservatism developed. Tracing the influence that the commonsensism of Thomas Reid and Edmund Burke had upon the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown, the moral philosophy of Samuel Stanhope Smith and Levi Frisbie, and the literary criticism of Edward Tyrrel Channing, the chapter provides an overview of an early national conservative epistemology that influenced Poe, Hawthorne, and Webb. Chapter Two reads Poe's tales of perversity (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, "The Black Cat," and "The Imp of the Perverse") as critiques of the antebellum culture of sentiment, demonstrating that although Poe was sympathetic to sentimental critiques of reason, he nonetheless complicated progressives' frequently monological understanding of affective morality by placing not a benevolent "man within the breast" but, rather, a malignant "imp of the perverse" at the heart of subjectivity. Chapter Three reads Hawthorne's The Life of Franklin Pierce alongside The Blithedale Romance, contrasting both books' "monstrous skepticism" regarding antebellum reformism (especially abolitionism) with the liberal perfectionism informing Lincoln's Civil War speeches. Finally, Chapter Four reads Webb's The Garies and Their Friends both for its communitarian critique of liberal identitarianism (represented by the practice of "passing") and its Marxist critique of laissez-faire morality, according to which sympathetic disinterestedness is an inevitable byproduct of economic self-interest.