By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Ante-Bellum America.

By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Ante-Bellum America. Criticism, writes Jerome Loving, "attempts to recover the dream- or the theme of the work - but in doing so it creates a new fiction byreshaping a reality already reshaped or experienced" (140). Thisformula well suits Loving's project in Lost in the Customhouse,which discusses the psychological work of literary authorship in thenineteenth-century United States as an existential quest in which the"American self" first attempts to jettison jettison(jĕt`əsən, –zən)[O.Fr.,=throwing], in maritime law, casting all or part of a ship's cargo overboard to lighten the vessel or to meet some danger, such as fire. the excess baggagerepresented by the social and political dimensions of reality, achievesin "psychological victory" the individuation individuationDetermination that an individual identified in one way is numerically identical with or distinct from an individual identified in another way (e.g., Venus, known as “the morning star” in the morning and “the evening star” in the ofMelville's "carpet-bag - that is to say, the Ego,"becomes existentially lost and Puritanically reborn on "thisfrontier of the imagination" (xii-xiii), and eventually returns -after Whitman - to "the social cycle" (xiv). Not accidentally,Loving phrases his project as an elaboration of "American desire inliterature" (ix) rather than, for example, "desire in Americanliterature," because he simultaneously works to essentialize es��sen��tial��ize?tr.v. es��sen��tial��ized, es��sen��tial��iz��ing, es��sen��tial��izesTo express or extract the essential form of. American experience (as "utopian consciousness in the face ofpsychological and social change" [xi]) and universalize u��ni��ver��sal��ize?tr.v. u��ni��ver��sal��ized, u��ni��ver��sal��iz��ing, u��ni��ver��sal��iz��esTo make universal; generalize.u literaryvalue in the representation of psychological reality("psychological facts that blossom into the fiction of the selfbegotten be��got��ten?v.A past participle of beget.begottenVerba past participle of begetAdj. 1. out of the nothingness of existence" [xi]) or theoperations of psyche on encumbering reality so that "the nature of[Twain's] concern" in representing race-questions "is notexactly about the socially oppressed but about the idea of thatoppression and its consequences upon the supposedly detachedwriter" (xv; emphasis Loving).Characterized by sporadic infelicitous asides assailing variousschools of literary criticism, Loving's own "new fiction"documents the psychological work of its author. Defining his booknegatively - as a kind of anti-sociological contribution to a perceivedculture war between a coalition of neo-Marxist, feminist, postmodernist,New-Historicist, deconstructivist canon-busters on the one hand andproponents of literature on the other - Loving defensively explains,"Rather [than a sociological argument], I present a narrative inwhich I encounter and experience these twelve writers, after twenty-fiveyears of reading and teaching American literature. I have set out tocelebrate their works in the enjoyment of writing about them as theydeserve to be perceived - as literary geniuses instead of ingeniousideologues" (xviii). The often acute and stimulating celebration ofthe psychological aspects of authorial work and authorial pleasure thatguides this distinguished scholar's critical practice is frequentlyobscured by Loving's perception of an irresolvable ir��re��solv��a��ble?adj.1. Irresoluble.2. Impossible to separate into component parts; irreducible. chasm betweenliterature and ideology, or psychology and sociology - and his corollaryperception of an intrinsic, exclusive association between literary valueand psychological truth. Implicit in his valorization val��or��ize?tr.v. val��or��ized, val��or��iz��ing, val��or��iz��es1. To establish and maintain the price of (a commodity) by governmental action.2. of a literature ofpsychological separation is the claim that literature unfolds in a kindof ideology-free zone (reflecting his apparent confidence that his ownexperience as a teacher, thinker and writer is similarly insulated).What distinguishes "literature" from other writing for him isthe operation by which literary genius transcends ideology intooriginality. (Although Loving insists that the existential quest oftenreturns the literary subject to society - "that second chance ofcoming into experience anew" [ix] - literariness inheres for him inthe psychological experience of the quest, so that renegotiation of thesubject's relation to society can only be transcendent and neverimmanent im��ma��nent?adj.1. Existing or remaining within; inherent: believed in a God immanent in humans.2. Restricted entirely to the mind; subjective. .) Of his twelve literary subjects (Irving, Hawthorne, Melville,Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Dickinson, James, Chopin, andDreiser), Loving makes this claim for their exclusive canonicity:"these twelve remain central to America's claim for anoriginal literature. Without them, American literature of the lastcentury, with few exceptions, is largely sociological and'political'" (xviii). Whatever the merits of such aclaim, it becomes evident that the psychological work of Loving'swriting offers a very personal resistance to the perceived threat ofsociologically-based criticisms to the centrality of his own practices.Loving's own ideology attempts to insulate him from essaying thecultural work demanded of contemporary criticism, which seeks to rendervisible some of the ideology supporting "literary geniuses"and some of the genius expressed by what he calls "ingeniousideologues." Enacting the pattern he ascribes to his subjects - ofa perpetual return to a prelapsarian pre��lap��sar��i��an?adj.Of or relating to the period before the fall of Adam and Eve.[pre- + Latin l identity scene - Loving's bookrepeatedly returns him to a critical posture where aesthetic practiceappears ipso facto innocent of the social or political concerns that,evidently, weigh heavily on him. United by his effort to extend a narrowvariation of Mathiessen's renaissance (as rebirth through literarypractice) throughout the nineteenth century, Loving's twelvereadings begin by ascribing to Irving's Sketch Book the origin of"the pattern in American literature in which the Isolato runs awayfrom home in order to envision his (and later her) place in it" (9;emphasis Loving). Like the Rip Van Winkles he goes on to portray as theexclusive emblems of an awakened American literary subjectivity("Emerson's Central Man, Thoreau's Utopian Hermit,Whitman's Solitary Singer, Poe's Man of the Crowd,Hawthorne's Pilgrim in the Dark Wood, Melville's LoneSurvivor, Dickinson's Supposed Person, and others" [9]),Loving runs away from an apparently deeply-felt social reality in aneffort to wake up to another cultural (and critical) scene than the onein which he finds himself. Loving lives this oneiric adventure, offeringan anecdote regarding his experiences as a Fulbright lecturer in Parisduring 1989, in which he awakens with relief to a French intellectualcommunity less enamored en��am��or?tr.v. en��am��ored, en��am��or��ing, en��am��orsTo inspire with love; captivate: was enamored of the beautiful dancer; were enamored with the charming island. of the francophone "methodologies"that he perceives as having been "sold" to the Americanacademy, and returns to the United States feeling restored in hisreliance upon "the imaginative techniques of the New Critics"(213). Despite Loving's further reliance upon what he describes as"the most empirically based history" (213), his bookaccomplishes less than it might have precisely because he declines tomeet literary practices, whether criticism or authorship, in history.His readings often touch upon important themes - Melville and theliterary marketplace, Dickinson and feminist discourse, HenryJames's suspicion of individualism, Twain's representation ofAfrican Americans, Dreiser and material culture - and yet rarely developthese themes. He brings up the question of feminism with reference toDickinson, for example, only to frame it out of his reading: "Hersense of gender served as a ploy, as it were, to trick her persona intolooking at the human drama from an outsider's . . . point ofview" (144). It hardly seems likely that Dickinson or her personaneeded to be "tricked" into a gendered sense of marginality.Loving's reduction of Dickinson's gender to a "sense ofgender" is his own ploy, not hers, enabling him to argue thatDickinson's work intrinsically (and not his own new fiction by wayof a narrow ideology of literary value) "relentlessly resists apolitical canonization canonization(kăn'ənĭzā`shən), in the Roman Catholic Church, process by which a person is classified as a saint. It is now performed at Rome alone, although in the Middle Ages and earlier bishops elsewhere used to canonize. in our time" (147). Loving quiteahistorically (and repeatedly) implies that because what he chooses tocharacterize as feminism ("the contemporary debate or cause"[141]) is a twentieth-century phenomenon, the question of gender is onlyrarely, and generally subordinately, relevant to the work of criticism:"Ultimately, Isabel [Archer]'s problem is not with her gender. . ." (174). Relying on an implicitly progressive model ofhistory, writing of class as a "tradition" (169) and not as amaterial condition, confusing gender with feminism, bizarrelycharacterizing "the worst aspects of postmodernism" as"the tendency to see life as posthumous" and a "relativenihilism nihilism(nī`əlĭzəm), theory of revolution popular among Russian extremists until the fall of the czarist government (1917); the theory was given its name by Ivan Turgenev in his novel Fathers and Sons (1861). " (217, 209), and suggesting without any furtherelaboration that the texts he studies "remain beyondreconstruction" because of their status as "acknowledgedclassics of American literature" (218), Loving's attacks oncontemporary critical practices almost uniformly miss the mark becausehe refuses to engage them seriously or even informedly. If his argumentthat some American writers desired to engage in authorship asidentity-dreaming in a realm insulated from society and politics isoccasionally persuasive, he makes no case that the work of criticismshould be to emulate that model.Nicholas K. Bromell's study of antebellum work and theelaboration of the ideology of that work in United States literaryhistory also develops a portrait of nineteenth-century authorship thatcan be related to the critic's own practices. If Loving enacts adream of literary practice transcending culture, the author of By theSweat of the Brow In a traditional English idiom, the sweat of one's brow refers to the effort expended in labor, and the value created thereby.[1][2] The phrase is famously used in English translations of Genesis 3:19. : Literature and Labor in Antebellum America haslabored, within archives and across disciplines, to produce a booksensitive to its position at the nexus of a number of ongoingconversations. With impressive erudition er��u��di��tion?n.Deep, extensive learning. See Synonyms at knowledge.Eruditionof editors—Hare.Noun 1. , Bromell's book recoversthe operation of writing as work in several reinforcing fields ofdiscourse from reform rhetoric to slave autobiography. Includingchapters on Melville, Thoreau, Rebecca Harding Davis Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis (1831-1910; born Rebecca Blaine Harding) was an American author and journalist. She is deemed a pioneer of literary Realism in American literature. , Susan Warner,Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass, Bromell persuasivelydemonstrates that insofar as a writer's representations of laborare themselves work (and not, for example, the effortless andtransparent record of a dream), authorship cannot picture work in a viewfrom nowhere and instead operates immanently, actively participating inthe social contest over the meaning and value of labor. Establishing intwo philosophically agile and well-researched early chapters theimportance of the antebellum work discourse for literary study, Bromelllocates literary practice and the ideology of literature in the emergentdistinction between mental and manual labor (and the associatedcomplexities of class, race, and gender). Where Loving seeks touniversalize and extend diachronically the "AmericanRenaissance" paradigm of the dreaming isolato, Bromellsynchronically enlarges the antebellum field of study by revealing laboras a source of literary value in the period. "[T]he dreamy reveriesand the unfolding of the self in idleness that were celebrated andcherished as prerequisites of creativity" by the canonized authorsof the period were not similarly valued by women and writers of color,Bromell observes: "Those moods for Stowe could be regarded only as'physiological infirmities.' . . . Whereas the masculineimagination might be able to locate itself in a purely mental, orspiritual realm and complain about yet dissociate dis��so��ci��ate?v. dis��so��ci��at��ed, dis��so��ci��at��ing, dis��so��ci��atesv.tr.1. To remove from association; separate: itself from thedemands of the body, Stowe's felt too identified with the body towill such a disjunction disjunction/dis��junc��tion/ (-junk��shun)1. the act or state of being disjoined.2. in genetics, the moving apart of bivalent chromosomes at the first anaphase of meiosis. " (169-70).Chapters on Melville and Thoreau demonstrate some of the difficultiesof attempting to valorize val��or��ize?tr.v. val��or��ized, val��or��iz��ing, val��or��iz��es1. To establish and maintain the price of (a commodity) by governmental action.2. manual labor as a means of overcoming theontological difficulties of the mind-body distinction while stillresting on the epistemological privilege of mental work. LikeMelville's carpenter, whose brain, "if he ever had one, musthave early oozed into the muscles of his fingers," Walden'swoodcutter Therien thinks within his "animal life" and evadesthe mind-body distinction while further evading literary representation:"his person, although full of 'thought,' produces almostnothing which 'can be reported'" (38-39). Demonstratingthe profound connections between Melville's sense of disempowerment"as a wage-earner in the literary market-place" (68) and theclass-consciousness of the Chartist ChartistAnother name for technical analyst. This is a person who uses charts to identify patterns that can suggest future activity.Notes:Chartists use technical analysis for just about any type of financial security, especially stocks and commodities. Jackson in Redburn, Bromell developsa nuanced reading of Melville's frustrated erotics of manual labor.For Melville, "men who work together with and through their bodiesseem to stand on the threshold of a marvelous possibility - that theymight turn from their work together and . . . grasp and love oneanother" (77). This erotic fantasy can never be realized becauseMelville's experience of manual labor on shipboard and hisexperience of mental labor as an author alike made present to him not autopian fraternality but "the deathly consequences of work'sunremitting hostility to desire" (72). Demonstrating in theworkplace scenes of "Bartleby the Scrivener," White-Jacket,and "The Paradise of Bachelors, The Tartarus of Maids" anawareness that the failure of manual labor to realize its erotic (andepistemological) potential has much to do with class and the sexualdivision of labor, Bromell argues successfully that Melville'ssense of the failure of his own scene of writing (of his books as"botches") rests on similar grounds: "The repression ofself demanded by writerly work" in response to the demands ofpropriety, the marketplace, and ideologies of representation, forexample, "is somehow like the corruption of desire demanded by moredisciplined and hierarchically ordered work" (75). Melville'stwofold sense of literary injury is thoroughly work-related: he feelskeenly the social restrictions upon the paid labor of representation,and struggles manfully man��ful?adj.Having or showing the bravery and resoluteness considered characteristic of a man. See Synonyms at male.manful��ly adv. with the false promise of language to do the workof representation for him.The high points of Bromell's book are the consistentlyilluminating third and fourth sections, "Labor's GenderedBody" and "Writing the Work of Slaves." Both sectionsdescribe ways in which antebellum writers overcome the ontologicaldivision between mental and manual labor by subverting theepistemological privilege of mind over body. In the latter section,squarely addressing the question of whether or not the slave can be saidto work at all (in the "unending life of labor which permits nodistinction between 'life' and 'labor'" [178]),Bromell shows how "the slave sometimes finds within self-motivatedwork an effective escape from the master's control" (182).Sensitive close readings of slave autobiography support this contention,illustrating how even under the overseer's eye slaves assertedcontrol over the rhythm and meaning of their work, sometimes by aninvestment of pride in the skill or quantity of their production, othertimes by asserting the invisible agency that inheres in the small butinevitable rests and pauses of the labor itself. Developing thisinvisible, interstitial, body-centered actualization actualizationPsychiatry The realization of one's full potential of "a realm offreedom within work" (187), Bromell points convincingly to the waythat Douglass's 1853 revision of his autobiography casts hisdeveloping freedom within "his history as a laborer" (195).While that portrait relies on a model of "an ascent from manual tomental labor," the revisions express a new emphasis upon the valueof embodied labor, and through that altered emphasis"Douglass's increasing acceptance of his racial identity - anidentity in which the relation between 'self' and'body' is crucial" (196; emphasis Bromell).Bromell's account of Davis, Stowe, Sedgwick, Warner, and Gilmandescribes these writers' efforts to grapple with to enter into contest with, resolutely and courageously.See also: Grapple the embodied factof domestic labor and the ideology of the Angel in the House as oftenthe central topoi to��poi?n.Plural of topos. of their prose, and also as determinants of theirwriterly working conditions and representational strategies. The mentaland manual labor distinction plays out with particular complexity forwomen, Bromell argues, because domestic ideology increasingly portrayswomen's work ("as the domestic custodian of herchildren's mind and souls") as spiritual rather than embodied- while the experience of women testified that "such labor is alsounavoidably corporeal Possessing a physical nature; having an objective, tangible existence; being capable of perception by touch and sight.Under Common Law, corporeal hereditaments are physical objects encompassed in land, including the land itself and any tangible object on it, that can be " (123-24). Focusing on "the mutuallycomplicating relation between the labors of writing and mothering"(135), Bromell argues that the ideological formations of maternal work(moral instruction; self-abnegation; emphasis on a spiritual reality; animmediate, local, and intimate relation of speaker to audience; anadhesive rather than isolating ideal of relations) shaped thesewriters' literary practices. In this account, particularly as itcenters around Stowe, writing enacted as maternal work offers thepossibility not only of reconciling the woman writer's two scenesof labor, but of reconciling the epistemological fault line erectedbetween mind and body, and developing a profoundly immanent ideology ofwriterly work, one that values the writer's activity within asocial field. The only reservation I have with Bromell's reading isthat he does operate chiefly within the maternal work paradigm, perhapstoo narrowly identifying femininity with maternity, and not taking upthe question of women working as domestics, mill hands, seamstresses,schoolteachers, governesses, and the like, in other than maternalcapacities and evincing other than maternal aspects. In this connection,the omission from Bromell's study of such an obvious candidate asLouisa May Alcott's Work: A Story of Experience (1873; begun 1861as "Success" and based largely on the author's extensiveantebellum work experience in many of the capacities mentioned above) issomewhat surprising. This cavil CAVIL. Sophism, subtlety. Cavilis a captious argument, by which a conclusion evidently false, is drawn from a principle evidently true: Ea est natura cavillationis ut ab evidenter veris, per brevissimas mutationes disputatio, ad ea quce evidentur falsa sunt perducatur. Dig. aside, Bromell's study is anexceptionally acute contribution to antebellum literary history, onethat will certainly help to dislodge the centrality of thedreaming-isolato paradigm in the valuation of yesterday's literarypractice and today's critical practice alike.Bousquet is a Ph.D. candidate at the City University of New York The City University of New York (CUNY; acronym: IPA pronunciation: [kjuni]), is the public university system of New York City. Graduate School. He has been published in New England Quarterly andelsewhere, and is presently completing his dissertation, "ThePleasure Room: Theatricality and American Individualism 1824-1917."