Corsets with Copper Wire

The male telegraphers whose voices originally predominated in disembodied speech forums sometimes suggested that women should be excluded from virtual speech forums, and often worried that women should interact in the virtual world in traditionally gendered ways. Such nineteenth-century women telegraphers as Ella Thayer and Lida Churchill nevertheless voluminously produced literature that provided a format for their own technologically enabled literary utopias of new gender forms in the telegraphic virtual realm. Telegraphy seems to have appealed to women writers exactly because it provided a freedom that authors otherwise achieved primarily through the creation of literature. The freedom women experienced virtually emboldened the inscription of newly gendered models for both virtual and physical-world selfhood through the creation of women telegraphers’ literature.

Engineering Eden in Walt Whitman’s “Passage to India”

Walt Whitman wrote odes to Morse’s telegraph that present it as a cultural “monument” speaking its nation’s mythic history in the making. His telegraph poems imagine the electromagnetic telegraph to perform a spiritual purpose: for Whitman, the disembodied nature of telegraphy’s virtual realm allows settlers’ voices, and the nation’s mythic origin stories that those voices carry, to spread across, and eventually to soak into, newly colonized American lands. In so doing, telegraphy births a new and specifically American sort of electric oral tradition, which Whitman poetically links to the power of this land’s previous Native American oral traditions to construct spiritual connections to American earth and environments. His poems imagine for American settlers a new type of indigeneity through telegraphy.

Crossing Border Wires

Nineteenth-century U.S. telegraphers created literatures that debated new social roles in the virtual realm for various political minorities. Such U.S. telegraphers as Mattie Kuhn and Abraham Burstein develop autobiographies and fictions of poor working telegraphers who successfully use telegraphic networks to empower themselves and others like them to seek higher wages, stronger communities, and better lives. In literatures written by telegraphers, knowledge of telegraphic social networks wins everything from eight-hour work days for single mothers to reunions with long-lost family members in the lives of telegraphers whom corporate or government elites conspire to disempower.

Moccasin Telegraph

Nineteenth-century European American telegraph writers often conceive Native telegraph systems, not as primitive, merely metaphorical precursors to their own superior technology, but as in some ways differing, in some ways equivalent, always valid, and potentially threatening real telegraphs. Crow chief Plenty Coups and Crow medicine woman Pretty Shield tell of Native telegraphs that combat U.S. technologies throughout the Indian Wars and especially at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, with surprising national divisions and results, to show the extent to which perceptions about Native telecommunication systems potentially influence nineteenth-century and current understandings of telegraphy.

Introduction

In nineteenth-century America, Native Americans communicated long distance with smoke signals and Indian sign language to combat U.S. invasions across the American plains. Recently immigrated Morse telegraphers began to organize “online” for safer working conditions. Women telegraphers entered electric speech forums. These interactions inspired the creation of what this book dubs “telegraph literature”—the fiction, poetry, social critique, and autobiography that experiences of telecommunication inspired authors from vastly different social locations to write throughout nineteenth-century America. The telegraphic virtual inspired such canonical authors as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, alongside such lesser known authors as Lida Churchill and Crow medicine woman Pretty Shield, to explore how seemingly instantaneous, disembodied, nationwide speech practices challenged American conceptions of self, text, place, nation, and God.

Conclusion

Nathaniel Hawthorne uses the emblem of the telegraph-railroad system alongside other new technologies to present, then dispute, his era’s common vision of American history as destined to create social progress. In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne invokes technotopias of manifest destiny in order to dispute their claims of moral, intellectual, or social progress and to insist that unless we decide otherwise, human use of technology provides only new means to unimproved ends. Hawthorne’s avowedly romantic telegraph, rather than enacting a progress narrative, works cyclically, to return Americans to the moral burdens of having stolen land from its previous inhabitants, and to demand that they redress that wrong.

Emily Dickinson’s Telegrams from God

Dickinson’s telegraph poems explore the larger poetic connotations surrounding a natural power—electricity—which, harnessed by humankind in the medium of the telegraph, conveys meaning with the speed and energy of lightning. Dickinson sometimes poetically allies lightning with the voice of God and suggests that the electric telegraph harnesses God’s lightning voice to transmit the words of humankind. For this reason, while she sometimes poetically celebrates the telegraph as an emblem of individual autonomy against the voice of authority, she elsewhere considers the spiritual risks of blaspheming God’s lightning voice by training it to carry the words of humankind.