Touching liberty: abolition, feminism, and the politics of the body

408 Pages·1997·0.95 MB·English

by  Karen Sánchez-Eppler

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Page iii
Touching Liberty
Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body
Karen Sánchez-Eppler
University of California Press
Berkeley · Los Angeles · London
Page iv
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
First paperback printing 1997
© 1993 by Karen Sánchez-Eppler
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sánchez-Eppler, Karen.
Touching liberty: abolition, feminism, and the politics of the body /
Karen Sánchez-Eppler.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-21234-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. American literature19th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. Slav-
eryUnited StatesAnti-slavery movementsHistory19th century.
3. Feminism and literatureUnited StatesHistory19th century 4. Poli-
tics and literatureUnited StatesHistory19th century. 5. Women and
literatureUnited StatesHistory19th century. 6. Jacobs, Harriet A.
(Harriet Ann), 18131897Political and social views. 7. Dickinson, Emily,
18301886Political and social views. 8. Whitman, Walt, 18191892Polit-
ical and social views. 9. Slavery and slaves in literature. 10. Body, Human,
in literature.
I. Title.
PS217.S55S26 1993
810.9'003dc20 92-20377
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint two chapters of
this book that were previously published elsewhere. Chapter 1 appeared
under its own title in Representations 24 (copyright 1988 by the Regents
of the University of California) and has been reprinted in The New
American Studies, edited by Philip Fisher (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991), in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and
Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and as "Vincoli corporei: le
intersezioni retoriche di femminismo e abolizionismo" in Communitá:
revista di informazione culturale 193/194 (March 1992). Chapter 2
appeared as " 'To Stand Between': A Political Perspective on Whitman's
Poetics of Merger and Embodiment" in ELH 56 (copyright 1989 by Johns
Hopkins University Press).
Emily Dickinson's poetry is reprinted by permission of the publishers and
Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed.
Thomas H. Johnston (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University), copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and
Fellows of Harvard College. Poetry copyright © 1929, 1935 by Martha
Dickinson Bianchi; copyright © renewed 1957, 1963 by Mary L.
Hampson is reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company.
Page v
To Benigno
Page vii
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Representing the Body Politic 1
1. Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism 14
and Abolition
2. To Stand Between: Walt Whitman's Poetics of Merger 50
and Embodiment
3. Righting Slavery and Writing Sex: The Erotics of 83
Narration in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents
4. At Home in the Body: The Internal Politics of Emily 105
Dickinson's Poetry
Coda: Topsy-Turvy 133
Notes 143
Select Bibliography 175
Index 189
Page ix
Acknowledgments
The writing of this book has been buoyed and companioned by many
people.
Marcie Frank, Alexandra Halasz, Elizabeth Hanson, and Joseph
Harrison have read and argued with me since the earliest stages of this
project. They have done more to shape the ways I think and write than
I can ever thank them for.
In their own different ways Michèle Barale, Brenda Bright, Rhonda
Cobham-Sanders, Francis Couvares, Thomas Dumm, P. Gabrielle
Foreman, Judith Frank, Allen Guttmann, Carolyn Karcher, Barry
O'Connell, Andrew Parker, Shirley Samuels, Martha Sandweiss,
Valerie Smith, and Sasha Torres have clarified my thinking and
enlivened these pages. Their friendship and their companionship in
teaching and writing have given me courage and great pleasure.
This book grew out of my doctoral dissertation, and I am grateful to
my advisors. Sharon Cameron's luminous insights and demands for
precision have made my arguments far stronger than they would have
been without her. I owe her thanks for not indulging my frequent wish
that this be good enough, and for the faith in and commitment to my
work that helped make it better. Larzer Ziff's unfailing good humor,
intellectual generosity, and lucid prose have been a source of
inspiration and support. The patience and skill of Doris Kretschmer
and Erika Büky of the University of California Press have made the
final transformations easy.
My parents, Klaus and Joyce Eppler, have nurtured me toward this
project in all manner of ways. Their confidence and commitment
make even the hardest things seem possible. My sister, Amy Eppler-
Epstein, has shaped and shared my

Page x
vision of the world; my writing finds its ground in her work for social
justice and social change.
Finally my thanks to Alma and Elias Sánchez-Eppler, whose births
and growing have done much to slow this process, and more to make
it happy. And to Benigno Sánchez-Eppler whose presence,
intellectually and emotionally, suffuses this writing and my life.
Page 1
Introduction
Representing the Body Politic
In antebellum America, as in all states and all times, the "body politic"
was inhabited by an immense variety of distinct bodies, well-fed or
hungry, smooth-skinned or callused, strong or exhausted, old, young,
or middle-aged, male or female, dark-skinned or light or somewhere
between. The relation of the social and political structures of the
"body politic" to the fleshy specificity of embodied identities has
generally been masked behind the constitutional language of
abstracted and implicitly bodiless "persons," so that, for example, it
did not seem absurd for the founding fathers to reckon slaves as
''three-fifths of a person.'' To fraction an abstract "person" does not
require amputations. Such abstractions have not, however, gone
uncontested. This book investigates a crack in the hegemonic rhetoric
of political disembodiment. I argue that from the early 1830s through
the Civil War, these assumptions of a metaphorical and fleshless
political identity were disrupted and unmasked through the
convergence of two rhetorics of social protest: the abolitionist concern
with claiming personhood for the racially distinct and physically
owned slave body, and the feminist concern with claiming personhood
for the sexually distinct and domestically circumscribed female body.
Moreover, just as the notion of the universal, and so incorporeal,
"person" has had cultural ramifications that far exceed its appearance
in constitutional rhetoric, the development of a political discourse and
a concept of personhood that attests to the centrality of the body
erupts throughout antebellum culture. The extent to which the
condition of the human body designates