Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (review)

Sylvester Graham, the body reformer, considered himself a prophet, "an instrument of Divine Providence": "I feel that I know the mind of God," he wrote in 1840. "His spirit of Truth mixes with mine."¹ Many abolitionists, from William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe to Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, shared Graham's prophetic sensibilities. They felt that they knew what God wanted, which was an end of evil. They were millennialists, believed in an impending heaven on earth that would define America, and they sought to pave the way to their new age. But ending sin began with the self; purification was centrifugal, flowing outward from self to society. It is no wonder that the vast majority of abolitionists were also body and temperance reformers. In their quest to collapse the boundaries between the sacred and profane—heaven and earth—and purify self and nation, reformers were captivated with disembodied spirits and dead bodies.

Necro Citizenship highlights the dark side of Americans' faith in an immanent or in-dwelling spirit by exploring the political ramifications of their obsession with death and spirits. Castronovo has written a fascinating, deeply researched, challenging, and highly original account of the link between citizenship and death in nineteenth-century America. Focusing on necro ideology is an ideal way to dissect the possibilities and limits of nineteenth-century reform. Necro Citizenship should be required reading for anyone interested in the reform impulse.

Castronovo explores such manifestations of nineteenth-century reform as mesmerism, spiritualism, abolitionism and pro-slavery reactions, sexual purity, slave suicides, Emersonian self reliance, and the postbellum tensions between black rights and restrictions of those rights. He brings together canonical texts with little-known documents: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance (Boston, 1860) and Hiram Mattison's Spirit Rapping Unveiled (New York, 1853); Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (Boston, 1852) and John Page's Uncle Robin, in His Cabin in Virginia (Richmond, 1853); the writings of Graham and Seth Pancoast; and James Howard's Bond and Free (Harrisburg, 1886) and Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston, 1861). The result is a book that sheds important new light on canonical literature, cultural meanings of citizenship, and the relation between the public and private sphere in nineteenth-century America.

Castronovo cogently argues that attempts to collapse the boundary between heaven and earth often have adverse effects on public discourse and political action. Courting otherworldly spirits can instill a newfound sense of subjectivity among subalterns. Disembodied subjects enter the public sphere, but they have no claims on citizenship. "Political necrophilia," Castronovo argues, "fuels fascination with a citizenry immune to public commotion and insensible to contestatory energy (4)." On the one hand, nineteenth-century citizens cultivated spiritual demeanors "that released them from the contingencies and insistent needs of embodied existence," including citizenship (4). On the other hand, this same belief in the spirit world empowered people to attack prevailing hierarchies. Although reformers believed that purification and liberation flowed outward from self to society, Castronovo points to the limits of this ideology. Death brought freedom, as slave narrators frequently noted, but at the cost of material concerns and political exigencies. The quest to purify the self threatened to dilute the specific attacks against a state institution like slavery. In their struggle to enter the public sphere, spiritual voices often abandoned direct engagement with politics.

Castronovo organizes the book around a number of themes and readings: meanings of freedom; body reform, especially sexual conduct books; spiritualism and the occult; and post-Civil War legal definitions of national citizenship. The most exciting parts of the book are Castronovo's counter-narratives—those instances in which disembodiment becomes historically, and materially, liberating. In superb readings of My Bondage and My Freedom and Incidents in the Life...