Browsing by Subject "Nineteenth century"

Anticipating Freedom explores the numerous ways enslaved and freedpeople shaped the politics and policies of gradual emancipation in the British Empire, using Barbados as a case study. It binds antislavery debates, legislative reforms, and slave resistance into one conceptual frame to reveal the processes that informed the British Parliament’s decision to pass the Emancipation Act of 1833, thereby conditionally freeing thousands of enslaved men, women, and children across the British Caribbean. As a major sugar-producing colony for the British Empire, Barbados offers a unique context for studying emancipation in the Atlantic World. At first glance, the prospect of freedom seemed impossible due to the planters' utter dependence on slave labor. Still, emancipation in Barbados was achieved through the unyielding determination of enslaved people to resist their captivity and the antislavery legislation initiated by abolitionists in the British Parliament. Hence the project is arranged both chronologically and thematically. It begins with Bussa’s Rebellion of 1816 — the only large-scale slave insurrection in the history of Barbados — and its impact on British Parliamentary reforms designed to lessen some of the coercive aspects of slavery during the 1820s. Then, I examine the rise of slave resistance in the months leading up to Emancipation Day and their effect on the Emancipation Act of 1833. My dissertation concludes with a discussion on the implementation of conditional freedom known as ‘Apprenticeship’ in 1834 and the factors that led to its premature demise in 1838. Anticipating Freedom argues that the covert and explicit means through which men and women of African descent resisted enslavement influenced the British Parliament’s decision to implement an intermediate period between slavery and absolute freedom in Barbados. This revelation is significant because it broadens our understanding of what factors were taken into consideration during the antislavery debates between the abolitionists, planters, Members of Parliament, and Barbados legislators. Moreover, by prioritizing the wants, needs, and desires of enslaved and freedpeople in Barbados, we step away from romantic notions often associated with emancipation to focus on the quotidian realities of a society no longer ruled by slave labor.

Art music and folk music are all too often perceived as opposing concepts. The educated, elite practitioners of a notated art seem to have little in common with musically illiterate commoners who weave an oral tradition. However, these two modes have much to say to each other when brought together in dialogue. This dissertation traces the use of Swedish folk themes in nineteenth-century art music—the era of a widespread interest in folk culture that quickly enthralled much of Europe, thanks to Johann Gottfried von Herder’s many disciples such as the Brothers Grimm—and provides a framework through which to understand the musical expression of a culture that has thus far been rendered largely invisible to non-Swedish-speaking scholars.

Though Sweden’s modern sovereignty dates back to 1523, the kingdom’s boundaries shifted dramatically early in the 1800s, as the eastern territory of Finland was lost to Russia in 1809 and the western land of Norway became linked with Sweden via union in 1814. Correspondingly, the question of what it meant to be “Swedish” demanded reevaluation. One response was to transcribe, edit, and publish collections of traditional songs and instrumental tunes as supposed treasure troves of cultural history. These arrangements, which were filtered through musical notation and given newly composed harmonic accompaniments, say more about educated perceptions of folk music and expectations of acceptable performance than they do about actual folk performance practices. Through the medium of print, these “cleaned-up” songs found wide circulation in print and formed the basis for many later compositions. I take a genre-based approach and analyze stages of development of the use of folk melodies in piano-vocal arrangements, male choral settings, theatrical works, piano literature, and chamber and orchestral music.

The political scientist Benedict Anderson writes of “imagined communities,” in which people who never meet nevertheless imagine themselves as part of a single group due to a deep sense of innate comradeship. I argue that, in Sweden, shared knowledge of the most popular traditional songs, and the recognition of the use of these songs in other compositions, helped facilitate the “re-imagination” of the Swedish nation-community during a time when cultural and political allegiances were in flux.

Similar phenomena have been widely observed with respect to other European countries, but Swedish music has not yet been studied in equal depth, likely because there was no figurehead composer of national and international prominence. To date, no systematic investigation of compositions based on Swedish folksong has been carried out. This dissertation draws on extensive research of little-known archival sources, including manuscript and rare published scores, letters, and contemporary newspaper reviews. In addition, it contributes to the field by entering into dialogue with existing Swedish-language scholarship, which has hitherto been inaccessible to most scholars outside Scandinavia. With this dissertation, I join a scholarly community spanning both sides of the Atlantic.

The cemetery reforms of the Napoleonic era formulated a heavily regulated, health-conscious system of burial throughout the French empire that, in its most radical move, ensured all citizens would have the right to a separate plot within a public cemetery, regardless of socioeconomic status or religious affiliation. This not only transformed the manner in which people were buried, but also how the lives of otherwise unremarkable individuals would be commemorated, remembered, and valued. Particularly as the middle classes of Paris acquired greater social mobility, the cemetery increasingly became a place of social distinction. Yet burial space was only guaranteed for five years, unless one purchased a concession: a private land grant that transformed the public space of burial into parcels of private property either temporarily (up to 15 years) or in perpetuity. As only a small fraction of the population could afford to purchase plots in perpetuity, the vast majority of burials were, from their conception, temporary. Consequently, it has typically been only the most expensive tombs that have survived into the present day, leaving scholars with little material evidence with which to study the commemorative practices of the general population.

Contrary to past studies of French cemeteries, which have tended to prioritize architects and sculptors, this dissertation critically assesses the role of the marbrier (stonecutter) as the chief producer of funerary monuments, and their middle-class clients as central to the visual culture of commemoration in nineteenth-century urban burial spaces. Since extant examples of these more vernacular monuments are rare, this dissertation takes a database-driven approach to analyze commercial almanacs, work logs, and burial records in order to compensate for losses in the material record. This allows for the identification of significant patterns in the development of the funerary monuments industry, which—when contextualized among more traditional forms of art-historical evidence such as model books, plans and caricatures—reveals the peculiar relationship between funerary practices and the emerging consumer culture and urban reform campaigns of nineteenth-century Paris. This work firstly contributes to discussions of how database-driven methodologies can be used to more accurately reconsider subjects in visual and material culture studies, especially in cases where the objects of inquiry have not tended to survive into the present; and, secondly, provides the first study dedicated to the popular market for funerary monuments in France and the regulatory environment that spurred its development within the context of urban, social, and economic changes at the beginning of the Modern period.

My project, Manifesting Vertical Destiny: Geology, Reform, and the Stratified Earth in American Literature, Long Nineteenth Century, excavates the cultural impact of the concept of the layered earth—or strata—in American fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. In the nineteenth century, the concept of strata changed the planetary narrative, revising theological interpretations of earth history, showing that the earth was much older than humanity and that humans were one element out of many contributing to this narrative, and a recent one at that. As they encountered deep piles of distinct rock layers in which humanity was absent, scientists realized that in the long story strata told, humanity was a new character rather than a central player. As they reached the general public, these stories elicited lively debates about the place of the human, anticipating many of the debates we are having today surrounding the question of the Anthropocene. Manifesting Vertical Destiny chronicles these debates and their social and political consequences.

In four chapters, I place scientists and literary writers side-by-side, demonstrating how they variously engaged the insights of geology provided by strata. Four thinkers exemplify the response to the newfound diminishment of the human by finding a new role for humans in this transformed cosmos. Literary writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson assert the force of imagination for human preservation, using their literary works to transform the erasing power of telluric force into a power to reclaim the human. Similarly responding to the smallness of the human, the geographer George Perkins Marsh and the early American geologist William Maclure channel the stratigraphic imagination into new accounts of humanity writ large. Together, these figures show how strata inspired new ways of imagining the place of the human in society, while the literary case studies in particular demonstrate how the lessons of strata were working their way, metaphorically, into the collective imagination.

Ultimately, in looking downward, Americans discovered earth layers with no trace of the human. Such a conspicuous absence led these thinkers to pose the same question in the present: what are the limits of the human? In Manifesting Vertical Destiny, I show how the imaginative reconstruction of possible pasts within earth layers inevitably led Americans to reconsider the present and a hoped-for future. Geology and reform are intimately linked because, as Americans learned how to read the layered earth, they realized that each transition from one stratum to another marked a radical transformation in environment: the verticality of stacked-up layers denoted alternative places and times, in the form of ancient environments, within the same geographical point. The absence of the human within these many earth layers led nineteenth-century thinkers to question the impact of humans in their contemporary moment, pushing the boundaries of what was possible, from Hawthorne’s transformed literary vision to Dickinson’s argument for gender equality in the sciences, Maclure’s radical realignment of economic class, and Marsh’s evangelization of environmental ethics. For these scientists and literary writers did not merely dally in earthly depths—they claimed verticality.

From tendencies to reduce the Underground Railroad to the imperative "follow the north star" to the iconic images of Ruby Bridges' 1960 "step forward" on the stairs of William Frantz Elementary School, America prefers to picture freedom as an upwardly mobile development. This preoccupation with the subtractive and linear force of development makes it hard to hear the palpable steps of so many truant children marching in the Movement and renders illegible the nonlinear movements of minors in the Underground. Yet a black fugitive hugging a tree, a white boy walking alone in a field, or even pieces of a discarded raft floating downstream like remnants of child's play are constitutive gestures of the Underground's networks of care and escape. Responding to 19th-century Americanists and cultural studies scholars' important illumination of the child as central to national narratives of development and freedom, "Minor Moves" reads major literary narratives not for the child and development but for the fugitive trace of minor and growth.

In four chapters, I trace the physical gestures of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Pearl, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy, Harriet Wilson's Frado, and Mark Twain's Huck against the historical backdrop of the Fugitive Slave Act and the passing of the first compulsory education bills that made truancy illegal. I ask how, within a discourse of independence that fails to imagine any serious movements in the minor, we might understand the depictions of moving children as interrupting a U.S. preoccupation with normative development and recognize in them the emergence of an alternative imaginary. To attend to the movement of the minor is to attend to what the discursive order of a development-centered imaginary deems inconsequential and what its grammar can render only as mistakes. Engaging the insights of performance studies, I regard what these narratives depict as childish missteps (Topsy's spins, Frado's climbing the roof) as dances that trouble the narrative's discursive order. At the same time, drawing upon the observations of black studies and literary theory, I take note of the pressure these "minor moves" put on the literal grammar of the text (Stowe's run-on sentences and Hawthorne's shaky subject-verb agreements). I regard these ungrammatical moves as poetic ruptures from which emerges an alternative and prior force of the imaginary at work in these narratives--a force I call "growth."

Reading these "minor moves" holds open the possibility of thinking about a generative association between blackness and childishness, one that neither supports racist ideas of biological inferiority nor mandates in the name of political uplift the subsequent repudiation of childishness. I argue that recognizing the fugitive force of growth indicated in the interplay between the conceptual and grammatical disjunctures of these minor moves opens a deeper understanding of agency and dependency that exceeds notions of arrested development and social death. For once we interrupt the desire to picture development (which is to say the desire to picture), dependency is no longer a state (of social death or arrested development) of what does not belong, but rather it is what Édouard Glissant might have called a "departure" (from "be[ing] a single being"). Topsy's hard-to-see pick-pocketing and Pearl's running amok with brown men in the market are not moves out of dependency but indeed social turns (a dance) by way of dependency. Dependent, moving and ungrammatical, the growth evidenced in these childish ruptures enables different stories about slavery, freedom, and childishness--ones that do not necessitate a repudiation of childishness in the name of freedom, but recognize in such minor moves a fugitive way out.

From 1852 to 1910 Congress labored to find the right instruments to eliminate polygamy among the Mormons and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints struggled to retain its claim as the most American of institutions. What these struggles reveal about the shifting role of religion in the developing definition of American citizenship is at the heart of this dissertation. By looking at developing ideas about citizenship in this particular frame, the social and political history of exclusion and inclusion comes into focus and exposes the role religion played in determining who could lay claim to citizenship and who could not, who tried and failed, who succeeded, and why. In the end, the coercive measures of the state and their own desire to join the body politic drove the Saints to unquestionably abandon the practice of polygamy, a central tenet of their faith, so that they could be accepted as American citizens.

The battle over polygamy and the rights of polygamists was not limited to the floor of the U.S. Congress or the Supreme Court, although those sources are carefully examined here. Debates over polygamy and Mormons' right to be Americans also took place in sermons, novels, newspapers, and popular periodicals. Official actions of the state and popular discourses simultaneously defined citizenship and influenced how Mormons understood their own citizenship. This dissertation is a history of the discourse generated by Mormons and their antagonists, laws passed by Congress, and court cases fought to defend or deny the civil, political and social rights of Latter-day Saints.

Slavery and freedom are central issues in the historiography of nineteenth-century America. In the antebellum era (1820-1860), personal status was a fluid concept and was never as simple as black and white. The courts provide a revealing window for examining these ambiguities because court cases often served as the venue for negotiations over who was enslaved and who was free. In St. Louis, enslaved men and women contributed to debates and discussions about the meaning of personal status by suing for their freedom. By questioning their enslavement in freedom suits, slaves played an important role in blurring the law's understanding of slavery; in the process, they incurred the enormous personal risks of abuse and the possibility of sale.

Using the records of over 300 slaves who sued for freedom, as well as a variety of manuscript sources, newspapers, and additional court records, this project traces these freedom suits over time, and examines how slave law and the law of freedom suits shifted, mainly in response to local and national debates over slavery and also to the growing threat of anti-slavery encroachment into St. Louis. When the laws tightened in response to these threats, the outcomes of freedom suits also adjusted, but in ways that did not fit the pattern of increasing restrictions on personal liberty. Instead, the unique situation in St. Louis in the 1840s and 1850s, with its increasingly anti-slavery immigrant population, allowed slaves suing for freedom to succeed at greater rates than in previous decades.

My argument is that the rise of biology at the start of the nineteenth challenged the individualism of the Enlightenment, and that it fell to the novel to enable readers to reimagine themselves in light of the resulting contradictions. Chapter one considers how the eighteenth-century individual was dismantled, chapter two looks at the human organism erected in its place, and chapter three accounts for how human organisms form communities. By factoring fiction into the break between natural history and biology that Foucault identifies in The Order of Things (1966), I consider the effect of that epistemological shift on the history of subjectivity. In my first chapter I use Gillray’s satirical cartoon, The Cow-pock (1802), to show how the concept of a human being who is at once individual and organism was an unlivable contradiction, and how that contradiction played out in the cultural conflicts of the time. In the next chapter I use Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to argue that the novel reimagined life within that contradiction by reconfiguring individuation into an uncertain process whose goal is both unattainable and dangerous. Finally, I use Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) to show how the novel developed a new conception of community suited to the self-contradiction of the individual as organism.

"Utopian (Post)Colonies: Rewriting Race and Gender after the Haitian Revolution" examines the works of French women authors writing from just before the first abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1794 to those writing at the time of the second and final abolition in 1848. These women, each in different and evolving ways, challenged notions of race and gender that excluded French women from political debate and participation and kept Africans and their descendants in subordinated social positions. However, even after Haitian independence, French authors continued to understand the colony as a social and political enterprise to be remodeled and ameliorated rather than abandoned. These authors' rewritings of race and gender thus played a crucial role in a more general French engagement with the idea of the colony-as-utopia.

In 1791, at the very beginning of the Haitian Revolution--which was also the beginning of France's unexpected first postcolonial moment--colonial reform, abolitionism, and women's political participation were all passionately debated issues among French revolutionaries. These debates faded in intensity as the nineteenth century progressed. Slavery, though officially abolished in 1794, was reestablished in 1802. Divorce was again made illegal in 1816. Even in 1848, when all men were granted suffrage and slavery was definitively abolished in the French colonies, women were not given the right to vote. Yet, throughout the early nineteenth century, the notion of the colony-as-utopia continued to offer a space for French women authors to imagine gender equality and women's empowerment through their attempts to alter racial hierarchy.

My first chapter examines the development of abolitionism through theatre in the writings of Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793). At a time when performance was understood to have influential moral implications, de Gouges imagines a utopian colony to be possible through the power of performance to produce moral action. In my second chapter, I analyze how, during the slowly re-emerging abolitionist movements of the 1820s, Sophie Doin (1800-1846) and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859) expose the individual emotional suffering of slaves in an effort to make the violence of enslavement visible. In the process of making this violence visible, Doin's La Famille noire suivie de trois nouvelles blanches et noires (1825-6) and Desbordes-Valmore's Sarah (1821), in contrast with Claire de Duras's Ourika (1823), mobilize respect for motherhood to bolster their abolitionist claims. My third chapter analyzes the colonial novels of Madame Charles Reybaud (1802-1870), a forgotten but once-popular novelist, who uses the idea of the colony to develop a feminist re-definition of marriage involving the emancipation of males from their own categories of enslavement. Influenced by the Saint-Simonian thought of the July Monarchy, Reybaud imagines a utopian colony organized by a feminized French humanitarianism that attempts to separate French racial identity from that of the "Creole" colonizer. My final chapter compares this French desire to yoke utopia to colony with nineteenth-century Haitian attempts to reveal the opposite synergy: the inseparability of the institutions of slavery and colonialism. Haiti's first novel, Stella (1859) by Émeric Bergeaud (1818-1858), opposes racial hierarchy and defends Haitian independence in the face of harsh discrimination from an international community whose economies still depended on colonialism and slavery. In contrast with the previous texts studied in this dissertation, Stella imagines Haiti to have the potential to become a utopian postcolony, a nation freed from the constraints of colonialism in such a way as to serve as a model for a future in which racial hierarchy has no power.

Abstract

The album phenomenon developed in France and Spain and lasted throughout the entire nineteenth century. Albums were books with blank pages in which the owner collected contributions in the form of poetry, drawings, and music scores. These works were created for album owners by friends, acquaintances, and sometimes even suitors, and were meant to pay tribute to them. It is possible to imagine the album as a space of intense social and economic rivalry, in which owners of the books competed with one another to obtain the most luxurious books, and to fill them with the greatest number of entries from renowned artists. Similarly, contributors implicitly competed with one another to create the highest quality entries and contribute to albums that advanced their status as artists. However, established writers did not need further publicity, and many complained about the hassle of the constant request for contributions. To highlight the scope of the album phenomenon, and the frustration it caused writers and artists, José Zorrilla denounced album entry requests, stating that he had been solicited for album contributions a total of 188,000 times in his life. Honoré de Balzac condemned the album fashion even more fervently, declaring: "To hell with all albums."

I study the album as a practice that provides important information regarding gender, economic, and artistic exchanges in the milieus in which it flourished. My approach is based on the study of different types of texts. First, I analyze three essays on social customs that present the album from a perspective that mixes journalism and satire: Victor-Joseph Etienne de Jouy's 1811 essays "Des Album" and "Recherches sur l'Album et sur le chiffonier sentimental," and Mariano José de Larra's 1835 essay "El album." I use these essays to formulate a contextual theory on the album. I also examine nineteenth-century albums that I consulted in archives in France and Spain. Studying both the material construction of the albums and the contributions included in them, I try to understand the social and economic determinants of this social custom. Through the album entries, I explore the artistic networks established through, and exploited by, the album phenomenon, which were essential for successfully collecting contributions. Finally, I analyze fictional texts in which the album serves as a pivotal plot element used to shape the development of the stories and the roles of the protagonists. In my analysis of literary texts that portray the album, I focus on the establishment of gender and economic exchanges in this practice. I explore the imposition of traditional gender roles in the album phenomenon, according to which women were exclusively album owners and men were contributors. In my analysis of fictional texts, I also examine the economic aspect of this practice, reflecting upon the social class of the fictional characters involved in it. The literary texts that I study are: Honoré de Balzac's La Muse du département (1837), Manuel Bretón de los Herreros' El poeta y la beneficiada. Comedia en dos actos (1838) and El cuarto de hora. Comedia en cinco actos (1848), Juan de Ariza's "Historia de un album" (1847), Henri de Meilhac's L'autographe. Comédie en un acte (1858), Antonio Flores' "Cuadro cincuenta y uno. Placeres de sobremesa" (1863), José María de Pereda's Pedro Sánchez (1883), Juan López Valdemoro's "El álbum" (1886), and Leopoldo Alas `Clarín''s "Album-abanico" (1898).

The nineteenth century saw the rise of consumer culture and the proliferation of objects, such as cardholders, parasols, fans, pocket watches, and other trinkets. The album is at once part of this plethora of nineteenth-century objects and yet it is also distinct, in that it was a special piece of material culture that promoted a particular type of personal communication and required the creation of textual production. The album was established as a unique cultural manifestation, the study of which allows for a reconstruction of different types of social dynamics in its milieu.

Due to the complexity and richness of this object-centered practice, and the ways in which it developed, the album offers multiple analytical possibilities, as a social, historical, and literary phenomenon. One of the most significant contributions of this project lies in its transnational perspective and in its comparative analysis of different types of texts: essays on social customs, literary texts, and personal collections that survive in archival albums. The study of the exchanges that were fostered, and capitalized upon, through the album fashion is essential for understanding notions of private and public and collection as a practice. My analysis of the album yields invaluable insights into gender and class dynamics, ideas of art, and visual and material culture in nineteenth-century France and Spain.

This project examines dance scenes in nineteenth-century French novels written by women to consider how grace—beauty in motion—defines women as social, moral, and artistic actors. Creating a constellation of dance scenes, I develop a concept called graceful inclinations, meaning experiences that move observers to contemplate space, time, or bodies differently. I use this concept to study representations of women’s sexuality and subjectivity in dances scenes written by Sophie Cottin, Germaine de Staël, Barbara von Krüdener, Claire de Duras, George Sand, and Marie d’Agoult. Because previous studies of dance in nineteenth-century French literature focus predominately on texts by canonical male authors, scholarship on literary descriptions of dance is limited to a masculine perspective. Moreover, studies of the philosophical and esthetic meanings of grace rarely cite primary sources written by women, although, since the eighteenth century, grace has been closely associated with Western understandings of femininity.This project focuses on four genres of dance: contradances, the waltz, presentational dances (the shawl dance, quadrille, and bolero), and the tarantella. Whereas descriptions of contradances propose ideal social relations or contest the idealization of disembodied femininity, waltz scenes create dystopian depictions of upper-class debauchery and masculine authority. Characters performing presentational dances become archetypal representations of their gender or race. The tarantella in Staël’s novel Corinne, ou l’Italie presents the ultimate dancer who is graceful and sensual. Analyzing representations of exoticism throughout this corpus, I use Srinivas Aravamudan’s theory of Enlightenment Orientalism to consider how exoticized bodies became a testing ground for thinking about female sexuality. I draw upon the theories of Adriana Cavarero, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Genviève Fraisse, and Judith Lynne Hanna to study the sexual politics of dance scenes. In my study of the aesthetic and philosophical concept of grace, dance emerges as an art capable of moving its viewers but not yet capable of instigating social change. Creating both utopian or dystopian moments, dance scenes offer insight into the different worlds that writers wished to create or to avoid.