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DEATH

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Death haunts American literature. Upon even a cursory sampling of works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, or any of the other major writers of the nineteenth century, readers will trip over coffins, bump up against ghosts, hear voices from beyond the grave, and witness the shock of people buried alive, though these writers did not have a monopoly on the corpse and its afterlife. Popular works from the period, ranging from sentimental literature to sensational novels and from religious fiction to African American slave narratives, also fed a compulsive cultural imagination obsessed with death. With the carnage associated with places like Fredericksburg, Cold Harbor, and other Civil War battlefields, the American public was confronted by the dead and the dying on an unprecedented scale. But even before the eruption of hostilities between North and South, death was firmly lodged in the nation's literature, its psychological hold expressive of troubling political and social dynamics.

How is one to understand this morbid fascination with death? While the nation's fratricidal conflict killed more white Americans than any previous conflict, the body count in American literature both precedes and extends beyond the anxieties and mourning associated with the war years of 1861 through 1865. Even as one guards against reducing the obsession with death to a specific historical conflict, one must likewise prevent the tremendous literary energy lavished on death scenes and corpses from being simply abstracted and explained as some universal fascination with the inevitable. One must examine the ideological factors that gave death such resonance in American culture in the nineteenth century. Such factors are at once political, gendered, and national in nature and can be grouped into three general lines of inquiry: death as an anxious expression about the decay of the American Republic, the corpse as a specifically female body that resounds with uncertainties about the status of women in an era of public reform, and the afterlife as an eerie commentary on citizenship and freedom.

DEATH AND POLITICAL DECAY

Sucked into the whirlpool at the end of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) by Herman Melville (1819–1891), the whaling ship vanishes with all its crew save one sailor named Ishmael. An elaborate metaphor for the ship of state, the Pequod sinks, carrying with it a diverse crew that, like the United States, had been united around a single quest—to hunt the white whale. Only one object bubbles to the surface, escaping the vortex: a coffin carved by a reformed cannibal named Queequeg. Ishmael clings to this coffin even as he abandons the memory of Queequeg, his loving companion. The friendship between the two men represents the best impulses of democracy, including equality and a heart-felt commitment to others. The political significance of their homosocial bond is heightened early in the novel with Ishmael's famous comparison that "Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed" (p. 847). But by the novel's final page the comparison becomes an empty one as Ishmael floats on the husk intended for his friend's dead body. So, too, in an era of sectional division over slavery, the national promise encapsulated by the mythic Washington seems hollowed out, devoid of true meaning.

Ishmael's forgetting Queequeg typifies the malady of the post-Revolutionary generation that struggled to preserve the traditions and ideals of its forefathers. What would happen to democratic ideals and republican virtue now that the heroes of 1776 had faded into memory and as that memory itself faded? The deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, each on the Fourth of July 1826, poignantly staged the crisis confronting the citizens who inherited a nation from their political fathers. Would the nation die along with those men? The intense divisions over issues such as tariffs, territorial expansion, and most crucially, slavery seemed to indicate that the ship of state was indeed headed for dangerous waters and that this new country would not long outlast its dead founders.

For these reasons the body count of founding fathers must have been alarming for many nineteenth-century readers. As he wrote about the glories of national history, James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) found himself forced to confront the fact that the past was dead, never more to return. Although his romance of the American Revolution, The Spy: A Tale of Neutral Ground (1821), ends with a strengthened union as families from North and South unite in marriage, the final pages of this novel also witness the death of Harvey Birch, the patriot who worked selflessly for the American cause. He dies alone, deprived of human companionship, his national ardor a fragile relic of an almost forgotten past. When the novel was reissued in 1849 as the sectional crisis over slavery intensified, Cooper wondered aloud in his introduction whether the story of Washington could still exercise the mythic force to keep the nation intact. It seemed that the dead might really be dead, unable to offer the post-Revolutionary generation any advice about how to safeguard the political life of the new nation.

When in 1823 Cooper brought forth Natty Bumppo, his most famous hero, in the first in the series of novels that would be called the Leatherstocking Tales, Washington died yet another death in ways that deepened the gloom over the possibilities of interracial democracy. Much as Melville pairs Queequeg and Ishmael in a politically and erotically charged union, Cooper's white scout and his Indian chief, Chingachgook, commit themselves to a deeply felt companionship in The Pioneers; or, The Sources of the Susquehanna: A Descriptive Tale (1823). Wearing around his neck a silver medallion emblazoned with an image of Washington, Chingachgook symbolically recognizes the national paternal authority that in Cooper's world makes equality among men possible. Often given as part of treaty ceremonies between the federal government and Indian tribes, this medallion is brought into view by Chingachgook only "on great and solemn occasions" (p. 406), most notably his own death. As the flames of a wildfire swirl around his body, Chingachgook dies unadorned save for this icon of national promise. Washington's symbolic body becomes fuel for the fire. Although the chief's stoic resolve to his own fate participates in a voluntaristic logic that represented Native Americans as acceding to their own disappearance, The Pioneers also communicates a darker lesson in which fatherly law seems ready to perish as well.

Yet not all writers expressed loss or remorse over the death of America's paternal ancestors. In The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), both by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), men and women express a different sort of longing: if only the dead would die and stay dead. In "The Custom-House," his introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne feels oppressed by the burden of the past, weighted down by the memory that his Puritan ancestors were "conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches" (p. 126) that has made seventeenth-century Salem so notorious. Moreover, Hawthorne confesses to feeling judged by his stern progenitors for being nothing more than an "idler" and a "writer of story-books" (p. 127). It is thus not without some satisfaction that the strangulating influence of such forefathers is put to death when the novelist turns his attention to the Salem of his day. In The House of the Seven Gables the harsh Puritan strain remains ascendant, now embodied in the person of Judge Pyncheon, who uses the law's authority to harass his poorer relations. But in a scene dripping with sarcasm, Hawthorne's narrator badgers the judge, asking him repeatedly why he does not move, lest he miss a political meeting at which he is to be the guest of honor. The answer is that the judge is a corpse, having choked on his own blood. A hereditary gag reflex is the cause; the dead come back to kill the descendents who most resemble them. While disastrous for the judge, the murderous claims of the past are good news to the Pyncheon cousins, who have been suffering from both the judge's schemes and the psychological burden of family history.

For the citizens represented by the crew on Melville's ship of state, Cooper's frontier scouts, and Hawthorne's shopkeepers, death occasioned a sense of grieving as the bereaved often felt cut off from the political traditions that had secured the health and vitality of the nation. At the same time, however, death provided hints of liberation, suggesting that the post-Revolutionary generation could be freed from conventions and practices that had persisted since America's founding. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) in his essay Nature (1836), antebellum citizens could ask irreverently, "Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past?" (p. 7).

THE BEAUTIFUL CORPSE

Tragic as the deaths of the founding fathers may have been, no death in the nineteenth century was as traumatic as the passing of Evangeline in the antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896). Tens of thousands of readers were deeply moved by the death of this sainted child, and many even shed real tears as they watched little Eva waste away, imparting with her dying gasp millennial lessons about love, goodness, and perfect equality. Her death represents the height of American sentimentalism, a deeply emotional style that has been vilified for falsifying social reality even as it has been acclaimed for its affective power in changing attitudes and reorienting sensibilities. Certainly there is something troubling about a novel in which the death of a pampered slave owner's daughter threatens to overshadow—and sentimentalize—the historical actuality of racial bondage in the United States. Almost as certainly, however, the sentimental plea of Uncle Tom's Cabin caused many northern readers to feel personally and passionately about an issue—the abolition of slavery—that to many had no doubt seemed remote and distant. While it is difficult to settle this debate definitively, it is undeniable that the death of little Eva carries a political charge. On her deathbed this sinless child provides a glimpse of heaven on earth, a utopian world of pure equality based on love. As her slaveholding father comments, such a "little child is your only true democrat" (p. 211).

Eva's death fits within a larger cultural framework that idealized women and girls as the spiritual communicants of a pure social order. It was precisely their supposed proximity to death that allowed female trance mediums and clairvoyants to regale audiences with mystical pronouncements about abolition, women's rights, and eternal peace. Like Stowe's Eva, these women seemed barely embodied, hovering close to death, cultivating an aura of heavenly disconnection in which their near transcendence of earthly trappings left them free to glimpse vaster political truths that so surely eluded a world marred by slavery and other forms of injustice. Because they communicated with departed beings from the "other side," spiritualized women, such as those who practiced spirit rapping, gained access to public venues—lecture halls, abolitionist meetings, and reform conventions—previously denied to them. In addition to Stowe, prominent women activists and early feminists such as Amy Post showed an interest in the political reformist possibilities emerging mystically from the afterlife. Death, it seemed, promised a liberation unavailable in an earthly sphere contaminated by slavery and the subjugation of women. Once within a trance and insensible to the commotion of the terrestrial world, the female medium inhabited a shadowy and sentimental realm whose glorious freedom she shared with audiences at public séances. Women's participation in the public sphere of nineteenth-century America was thus organized around a contradiction: women can take part in public life only by approximating death. Uncle Tom's Cabin illustrates this contradiction perfectly as slaveholders and slaves alike are moved to follow Eva's living example of brotherly—and sisterly—love only once the girl dies. The power of sentimentalism to move and affect readers, in turn, pivots on the morbid faith that problems in this world could best be solved by attending to otherworldly voices channeled through girls and young women.

In 1846 Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) wrote that "the death . . . of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world" (p. 19). Poe's remark suggests the particular resonance attached to women in a culture that sentimentalized death and dying. Hawthorne's Miles Coverdale, the narrator of The Blithedale Romance (1852), no doubt models the attitude of many men who viewed this spiritual fad with a combination of distrust, contempt, and fear. Based on Hawthorne's own experiences at Brook Farm, a mid-century utopian experiment that included supporters of women's rights, abolitionists, and spiritualists, The Blithedale Romance is an erotically charged novel of voyeurism and betrayal that lavishes attention on women's bodies. Mediums, reformers, and frauds flit in and out of the novel, appearing on public stages and making appeals to the afterlife in order to ground their pronouncements in a mystical authority. While the young clairvoyant Priscilla certainly attracts her share of male interest, nobody is more subject to the public eye than Zenobia, a striking woman renowned for her intellect, reformist zeal, and literary talent. But Zenobia never garners so much attention as when she is a corpse.

In a scene rife with overtones of necrophilia, the men of the community drag her dead body from a river, puncturing the corpse with a hooked pole and grappling with her arms in an attempt to make a body affected by rigor mortis appear docile and penitent. Zenobia preeminently is a public woman (since the novel was first published her portrait has drawn comparisons to Margaret Fuller) who pays the ultimate price for disregarding social strictures that relegate women to private spheres. As Hawthorne implies in several instances, when Zenobia is alive, Coverdale is threatened by his own erotic desire for her. Is it possible that he really feels attracted to an unruly woman who does not know her place? But death allows him to sidestep this uncomfortable question without forcing him to give up his desire. Her dead body makes no feminist protests and is powerless to evade the invasive gaze of men like Coverdale, except that Hawthorne adds an ironic wrinkle to his narrator's morbid satisfaction: Zenobia's corpse itself remains recalcitrant, refusing to abide by notions of feminine propriety. Having retrieved the body from the river, the men of Blithedale determine that its posture is inappropriate, bearing an attitude of "immitigable defiance" (p. 837). But because rigor mortis has set in, they are powerless to alter her body's posture; in the most graphic way, the dead woman cannot be bent to their will.

Death, when conjoined with femininity, is the picture of acquiescence. Yet the corpse also houses uncontrolled and rebellious indications that not all bodies abide by earthly restraints.

FREEDOM AND DEATH

In other words, death implies a passport to freedom. Patrick Henry's famous challenge to British colonial authority—"Give me liberty or give me death"—is critically reworked in African American slave narratives, poetry, and fiction to stake a defiant posture against American slavery. Indeed the climax to the first African American novel, Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853) by William Wells Brown (c. 1814–1884), comes in a chapter titled "Death Is Freedom." How exactly does death liberate? In the case of Brown's heroine, a quadroon slave who can trace her bloodline back to Thomas Jefferson, suicide frees her from the institutional proscriptions that make her body the property of another. Pursued by slave catchers and with nowhere to turn, Clotel takes her own life by jumping into the rushing waters of the Potomac that flow by the nation's capitol. An abolitionist verse by Grace Greenwood (1823–1904), absorbed by Brown into his novel, memorializes the event with bitter irony: "To freedom she leaped, through drowning and death—/ Hurrah for country! hurrah!" (p. 222). Clotel's status as a slave woman's daughter is meaningless in the culturally lifeless vacuum that death provides. Her suicide radically divorces her from legal and racial contexts that legitimate bondage. Clotel finds peace in an eternal, final freedom that exists apart from the sociohistorical currents that give meaning to everyday life. Death radically abstracts her from history; indeed American freedom recognizes only an abstract identity.

Although perhaps extreme in its gothic sensationalism, Clotel's leap readily tallies with scenes of suicide, infanticide, and murderous longing in African American writing and abolitionist poetry and fiction. Morbid fantasies exerted an almost phantasmic hold upon antebellum audiences, especially after 1856, when the slave Margaret Garner killed her two-year-old daughter rather than see her fall into the clutches of slave catchers. But even before this much-publicized tragedy, deathly tropes were common to mid-century African American writing, including slave narratives by William Wells Brown and Lunsford Lane as well as Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative, an African American novel written in the 1850s but lost to readers until its discovery at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (1849), for instance, Henry Bibb (1815–1854) finds solace in imagining his wife's death. Because he has been unable to rescue her from southern bondage, he prefers to think of his wife as no longer among the living, freeing him—but not her—from the painful attachments that threaten his sense of liberty. Her death would leave him free; the fantasy of her death permits him to construct, in self-negating terms, an identity that, like Clotel liberated by the cessation of being, neither suffers nor enjoys any earthly entanglements. But whereas Clotel takes her own life, Bibb sacrifices the memory of his wife, thereby escaping the fatal implications of American freedom.

In order for death to secure liberty, it must produce a political identity that is both steeped in the isolation of abstraction and unswerving in its forgetting of all cultural contexts, including one's family, friends, and past. Freedom demands social death. Clotel, Bibb, and the other heroes and heroines of antislavery literature, who ponder suicide and see liberty as residing only in the afterlife, construe freedom as befitting only a lifeless political subject, a figuratively bloodless person who knows neither memory nor embodiment. Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the great antislavery orator and black leader, was not immune to this deathly political rhetoric either. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) invokes Patrick Henry's morbid trope, but by the time of his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass had come to see the need of moving beyond absolute political formulas based on an extreme all-or-nothing logic. Quoting Henry's dictum of "liberty or death," Douglass implies in this later work that this expression is "incomparably more sublime" when "practically asserted by men accustomed to the lash and chain—men whose sensibilities must have become more or less deadened by their bondage" (p. 312). Because Douglass's claim to freedom never forgets the institutional history of its own origin, never outstrips whips or fetters, his political identity exceeds standard American formulas linking death and liberty. In effect Douglass's freedom is practical and worldly, not abstract and eternal. Consequently Douglass moves beyond death to think about an experience of citizenship rooted in life and memory, no matter how traumatic or pained.

See also The Blithedale Romance; Cincinnati; Civil War; Clotel; Gothic Fiction; The House of the Seven Gables; Leatherstocking Tales; Moby-Dick; Mourning; Slave Narratives; Slavery; Uncle Tom's Cabin

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Bibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave. 1849. In Slave Narratives, edited by William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates Jr., pp. 425–566. New York: Library of America, 2000.

Brown, William Wells. Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. 1853. New York: Citadel Press, 1969.

Brown, William Wells. Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. 1847. In Slave Narratives, edited by William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates Jr., pp. 369–423. New York: Library of America, 2000.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers; or, The Sources of the Susquehanna: A Descriptive Tale. 1823. In The Leatherstocking Tales, vol. 1, edited by Blake Nevius, pp. 1–465. New York: Library of America, 1985.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Spy: A Tale of Neutral Ground. 1821. New York: AMS Press, 2002.

Crafts, Hannah. The Bondwoman's Narrative. c. 1850s. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Warner Books, 2002.

Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. 1855. In Autobiographies, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., pp. 103–452. New York: Library of America, 1994.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. 1845. In Autobiographies, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., pp. 1–102. New York: Library of America, 1994.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. 1836. In Essays and Lectures, edited by Joel Porte, pp. 9–49. New York: Library of America, 1983.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. 1852. In Novels, edited by Millicent Bell, pp. 629–848. New York: Library of America, 1983.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. 1851. In Novels, edited by Millicent Bell, pp. 347–627. New York: Library of America, 1983.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 1850. In Novels, edited by Millicent Bell, pp. 115–345. New York: Library of America, 1983.

Lane, Lunsford. The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N.C. 1842. In Five Slave Narratives: A Compendium, edited by William Loren Katz. New York: Arno Press, 1968.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. 1851. In Redburn, His First Voyage; White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War; Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, edited by G. Thomas Tanselle, pp. 771–1408. New York: Library of America, 1983.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Philosophy of Composition." 1846. In Essays and Reviews, edited by G. R. Thompson, pp. 13–25. New York: Library of America, 1984.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. 1852. In Three Novels, edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar, pp. 1–519. New York: Library of America, 1982.

Secondary Works

Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Bercovitch, Sacan. The Office of the Scarlet Letter. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Hollis Robbins. In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on the Bondwoman's Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Goddu, Teresa. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Laderman, Gary. The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799–1883. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996.

Levine, Robert S. Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Weisenburger, Steven. Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.

Russ Castronovo