| This dissertation examines representations of, responses to, and arguments for and against capital punishment in American law and literature from 1830 to 1925. In exploring this topic, I expand the usual definition of "capital punishment" as lawful institution in order to consider lynching as an unofficial or illicit form of the death penalty, since one of my central lines of inquiry explores the fine line that separates legal from extralegal executions. Although an act of lynching differs in obvious and important ways from the death penalty as a legal act, it qualifies as a kind of death sentence insofar as it takes place through social or communal violence, assumes supreme authority over its condemned subject, and is often carried out in the name of "the people," a highly contested category that my study problematizes.; The dissertation centers on the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Theodore Dreiser, but it also considers anti-gallows or anti-lynching writing by authors such as John L. O'Sullivan, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Paul Laurence Dunbar in relation to statements in favor of capital punishment made by important cultural figures of the time. Furthermore, my project gives close attention to legal discourse, such as summations by Daniel Webster and Clarence Darrow in prominent capital cases, as well as important anti-lynching movements in the nineteenth century. My underlying thesis is that the high stakes and sharply delineated contours of "capital punishment" (again, both legal and extralegal) dramatize the confrontation between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority in its starkest terms. In particular, I examine interrelationships among literary and legal discourses in terms of questions concerning political and social forms of rule, subjectivity and citizenship, and social responsibility during this transformative period in the history of capital punishment in America.; Chapter 1 provides an overview of my project and gives particular attention to literature in relation to capital punishment. Chapters 2 and 5 serve as book ends, focusing on specific literary works by Hawthorne and Dreiser respectively in relation to the lawful administration of death. Chapters 3 and 4, the middle chapters, examine the work of Douglass, Wells, and Chesnutt in response to racial lynching and its rhetoric of justification. |
