The promise of privacy: A cultural theory of the literary sketch in antebellum America

This study investigates the antebellum literary sketch as a field of conflict and accommodation for competing formulations of American authorship and cultural legitimacy. Washington Irving's introduction of the sketch as a genre that permitted the public expression of private experience refashioned European cultural authority and elite masculine subjectivity to fit the middle-class (male) American writer, whose profession was being accorded increasingly less privilege by early nineteenth-century American culture. Because it was conceived as the prime literary vehicle for representing the sincere private self, the sketch also allowed other occupants of the "private sphere" to vie for the right to participate in public, literary dialogue. The genre's "promise of privacy," shaped by bourgeois aesthetic criteria, eventually made barriers of gender, class, region and race permeable in antebellum America even as it functioned as a form of containment for what could be publicly and artfully articulated as private experience. My study is informed then by this tension between the promises and prohibitions represented by the antebellum literary sketch.;I first outline the parameters of my study, including questions of local vs. national culture, gender, ethnicity and class, the material conditions within which the sketch evolved, and the aesthetic of fragmentation that was produced by the genre's popularity. Next I identify the antecedents and paradigms of the antebellum sketch, explain its association with privacy and the development of bourgeois culture, and discuss a number of American sketchbooks that emulate or revise early models. I then examine the appropriation of the sketch by Southern, Western and New England authors for the re-presentation of centers of culture other than Northeastern cities. By fashioning authority as participatory, regional authors offer distinguishing resistances to the hegemonic, "national" pastoral. Finally, I investigate the challenges and concessions to bourgeois constructions of literature articulated in the sketches of Lowell mill writers and of Melville. Ultimately, my discussions of such authors as Hawthorne, Parton, H. E. Wilson, Mitford, Stowe, A. B. Longstreet, and C. M. Kirkland suggest that this seemingly marginal genre was central to the development of nineteenth-century American literature and culture.