Publication Type: Internal Paper
Abstract: In her 1985 Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860, Jane Tompkins called on scholars to approach “literary texts not as works of art embodying themes in complex forms, but as attempts to redefine the social order.” Tompkins’s notion of “cultural work” has remained enormously influential within American literary studies, especially because her book presented such work in upbeat and progressive terms. I will begin my talk by raising questions about Tompkins’s “cultural work” paradigm, exploring what (if anything) makes cultural work different from propaganda. Writers of propaganda attempt to influence large numbers of people to redefine the social order by using methods similar to those described by Tompkins: emotional cues (sentimentalism); the selective use of fact; narratives that change the way people think about the structure of reality. I will then turn to Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man without a Country” (1863), the most widely read and republished story in the United States during the 1863-1915 period, focusing on how Hale, somewhat in the mode of a propagandist, himself attempted to make the story do very specific cultural work. In “The Man without a Country,” Hale tells of a naval officer who joined with Aaron Burr’s conspiracy, renounced his country during a court martial, and then was sentenced to a life at sea in which he would never again hear a word about the United States. First published in the 1863 Atlantic Magazine, the story was initially read as a call to embrace the Union as the U.S. nation. But what’s really fascinating is the way that Hale increasingly used the story to promote his beliefs not only in the sacred importance of U.S. nationalism but also in the value of U.S. expansionism. I will focus on Hale’s edition of 1898, which comes with two introductions (totaling 37 pages) and the story itself (under 60 pages). In the first introduction, Hale states that he wrote the story to contest the 1863 run for the Ohio governorshipship of one Vallandigham, a Copperhead whom Hale believed was a man without a country. In the second introduction, he states that the story should now be read as a call for patriotic loyalty in the war against Spain. Terming the United States “The Lord God of nations,” he calls on Americans to present a unified front in the effort to expel Spain and spread the blessings of U.S. civilization to the southern hemisphere. This introduction reminds us of the hemispheric dimension of the story itself, which, among other things, celebrates the annexation of Texas. But the story also insists upon the uncertain, always changing, nature of the nation itself. What sort of cultural work did the story really do? Can propaganda be regarded as a method of stabilizing texts that do contradictory cultural work? These are among the questions that I’ll be addressing in my talk.