Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature

by Peter Coviello

Nineteenth-century America was a sprawling new nation unmoored from precedent and the mainstays of European nationalism. In their search for nationality, Americans sought coherence in a feeling of belonging shared among diverse and scattered strangers. Reading seminal works by Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman, Peter Coviello traces these writers' enthusiasms and their ambivalences about the dream of an intimate nationality, revealing how race and sexuality were used as vehicles for an assumed national coherence. As Coviello shows, race - and especially whiteness - functioned less as a form of identity than as a model of attachment and identification, a language of affiliation. Whiteness created an imaginary fraternity that symbolized citizenship, the ownership of property, and an affinity between strangers, which became entangled in the nation's evolving codes of sexuality. Bringing race theory and "white studies" into dialogue with questions of intimacy and affect, Coviello provides a practical rapprochement between historicist and psychoanalytic methodologies. Intimacy in America gives us a new perspective on the national meanings of race and sex in American literature, as well as on the still-current dream of American-ness as an impassioned relation to far-flung, anonymous others.

242 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Jared · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting arguments about what binds the nation and gives them a sense of unity (whiteness? erotic energy? suffering and trauma?) and some compelling reads of canonical texts like "The Fall of the House of Usher," Moby-Dick, Whitman poems, and the Declaration of Independence. One of the significant arguments was that whiteness began to replace property ownership in the early nineteenth century as the defining characteristic of being American both as a circuitous way to justify chattel slavery (enslaved people could never have the kind of autonomy required of a citizen, a kind of autonomy that only those with property used to be able to claim) and racism (the logic of replacing property ownership with whiteness relied on the inability to legally enslave a white person, making whiteness equivalent to owning the property of one's self). After establishing this narrative of whiteness as a form of political legitimacy and autonomy and as having the potential for a unique affinity between strangers, he spends most of the book showing how texts pushed back against or moved forward the idea of affinity with strangers, and how texts resisted to varying degrees the use of whiteness as a national sign of belonging. As he points out at the end, whiteness is less explicitly used to define Americanness today than in the nineteenth century, but it made me think about how the logics of racism have evolved and are still relied on.

[Ferentz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very quick read. At points the chapters/arguments are not as tightly connected as one might expect. They resemble stand alone articles. His analysis of Moby Dick, Poe and Slavery, are worthy for consultation if writing on these issues.