Pilgrimage to the “Secular Center”

This chapter revises standard accounts of the secularization of antebellum culture by examining the widespread practice among Protestant travelers of using physical landscapes as media for visualizing sacred history. It refers to tourism literature, aesthetic treatises, and best-selling sentimental novels by Susan Warner and Maria Cummins to uncover the clash of religious and secular interpretations in tourist landscapes. It also redefines the “secular center” of the American 1850s, not as a cultural space from which religion has been evacuated but one in which the proliferation of religious “options” plays out. The chapter examines the literary and visual production generated around the Catskill Mountain House and similar tourist sites. It analyzes how popular mediascape offers a way to rethink standard scholarly accounts that tell the story of antebellum culture as an orderly, linear transition away from the pieties of the Puritan past and toward the spiritual crisis of the Civil War.

The Sick Preface

Chapter 2 takes up the paratextual convention of the preface to a book by a single author. In the prefaces written by or about largely unknown, often small-town, lower-class women poets who existed far outside the canon’s gaze, we find a particular rhetorical convention employed ubiquitously over the course of the century. In these prefaces, women are declared to be both physically sick and resistant to the idea of public readers. While this convention got its start in the antebellum culture of charity, it persisted into the century’s final decade, and along the way the women poets who used it (and were used by it) registered both their compliance and resistance. By looking closely at both the rhetoric of these prefaces and the poems that follow them, this chapter unpacks these women poets’ relationships to a convention that declared them unworthy of any future readership.

Poe’s Terror Analytics

Poe’s production of magazine tales led to an intellectual preoccupation with terror—its origins, meanings, and effects. Read as analytical investigations into the causes of dread, many of Poe’s narratives offer striking insights into contemporary terrorism. Reexamining the events of 9/11 with Poe’s theory of the prose tale in mind, we understand better why symbolically unified events, orchestrated into dramatic action unfolding in ninety minutes, created sensational, overwhelming effects. Jean Baudrillard’s deconstruction of uncanny doubling in the 9/11 spectacle conversely explains the terrifying symbolic logic of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Poe claimed that terror arises from the soul, but threats from antebellum culture impelled his fiction: consumption, pestilence, premature burial, slave rebellion, and mob violence. Three tales—“The Man of the Crowd,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “Hop-Frog”—employ different strategies to analyze the creation and weaponizing of terror as well as how it may be demystified and managed.

RACE, RIGHTS, AND HIGHER LAWS IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

Susan M. Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence, Cornell University Press, 2003Gregg D. Crane, Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2002Moral sympathy does not necessarily imply condescension. Try to do something about sympathy, cross the line to benevolence, try to improve someone else's lot in life, and that can too easily change. Reform can become coercion and intolerance. The needy can come to seem permanently debased. They can also trick or manipulate the benevolent. These ambiguities pose severe problems for anyone who wants to imagine a democratic politics based on morality. Does neediness make the needy incapable of self-reliance and citizenship? Does benevolence corrupt the giver? Who gets to decide what laws are moral? According to literary scholars Mary Ryan and Gregg Crane, antebellum American literature perceived these problems and in many cases quite self-consciously tried to resolve them.