American Blood : The Ends of the Family in American Literature, 1850-1900

Conventional understandings of the family in nineteenth-century literary studies depict a venerated institution rooted in sentiment, sympathy, and intimacy. American Blood upends this notion, showing how novels of the period frequently emphasize the darker sides of the vaunted domestic unit. Rather than a source of security and warmth, the family emerges as exclusionary, deleterious to civic life, and antagonistic to the political enterprise of the United States. Through inventive readings supported by cultural-historical research, Holly Jackson explores critical depictions of the family in a range of both canonical and forgotten novels. Republican opposition to the generational transmission of property in early America emerges in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851). The "tragic mulatta" trope in William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853) is revealed as a metaphor for sterility and national death, linking mid-century theories of hybrid infertility to anxieties concerning the nation's crisis of political continuity. A striking interpretation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred (1856) occupies a subsequent chapter, as Jackson uncovers how the author most associated with the enshrinement of domestic kinship deconstructs both scientific and sentimental conceptions of the family. A focus on feminist views of maternity and the family anchor readings of Anna E. Dickinson's What Answer? (1868) and Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), while a chapter on Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter (1901) examines how it engages with socio-scientific discourses of black atavism to expose the family's role not simply as a metaphor for the nation but also as the mechanism for the reproduction of its unequal social relations. Cogently argued, clearly written, and anchored in unconventional readings, American Blood presents a series of lively arguments that will interest literary scholars and historians of the family, as it reveals how nineteenth-century novels imagine-even welcome-the decline of the family and the social order that it supports. American Blood foregrounds a culture-wide struggle over the definition and value of the family in the nineteenth-century United States. This study offers a new vision of the American novel in this tumultuous period, highlighting works that protest the overvaluation of kinship in American culture, depicting the domestic family as antagonistic to the political enterprise of the United States. Far from venerating the family as the nucleus of the nation, these novels imagine, even welcome, the decline of this institution and the social order it supports. Despite the founders’ concern that unseemly reverence for family relations might taint the new republic, the familial rhetoric of nationalism was deployed so energetically throughout the nineteenth century that reverence for the family came to seem like a core American value. Imaginative literature in this period retains an interest in the value of cutting blood ties, prizing the American dream of freedom from inherited identity. This study highlights works that criticize the expansion of the concept of family, viewing kinship as not only inadequate but dangerous in application to politics, suggesting that democratic citizenship should serve as the basis for coalitions across ascriptive differences. Six chapters chart the literary representation of the American family in relation to legal, scientific, literary, and political discourses from antebellum abolitionism through the Reconstruction suffrage debates, the burgeoning of feminism, and the “nadir” of post-Emancipation African American experience at the turn of the twentieth century Cover 1 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction 14 1. The Transformation of American Family Property in The House of the Seven Gables 36 2. National Reproduction and Clotel’s Queer Mulatta 57 3. “The Character of a Family” in Stowe’s Dred: On the Limits of Alternative Kinship 80 4. Resisting Reunion: Anna Dickinson and the Reconstruction Politics of Friendship 100 5. “Why I Hate Children”: The Willful Sterility of The Country of the Pointed Firs 123 6. Another Long Bridge: Textual Atavism in Hagar’s Daughter 143 Coda: Writing in Blood: Print Kinship? 164 Notes 172 Index 204 A 204 B 204 C 205 D 206 E 206 F 206 G 207 H 207 I 208 J 208 K 208 L 208 M 209 N 209 O 210 P 210 Q 210 R 210 S 211 T 212 U 212 V 212 W 212 Y 212 Z 212