Banking on Emotion: Financial Panic and the Logic of Male Submission in the Jacksonian Gothic

I love the paper money and the paper money men. . . . They ought to pay their promises, with promises to pay.—Thomas Love Peacock,

Paper Money Lyrics

He had become of late very importunate for his pay. . . . At first I kept interposing, trying to pacify him. . . . But I could not stop him, and soon my own temper was up. . . . I was excited to the highest degree of passion.

—John White Webster, The Extraordinary Confession of Dr. John White Webster, of the Murder of Dr. George Parkman

What are we to make of the panic-stricken professional male so often circulating in antebellum sensationalism? Eyes bulging, hair standing on end, often in flight from the persecutions of a malevolent (inevitably male) enemy, this figure predominates in the fiction of sensationalist writers such as George Lippard and Edgar Allan Poe, but he is also a mainstay of the seemingly limitless production during this period of pamphlet- and pulp-newspaper narratives about murder, sexual intrigue, and financial betrayal. Though easily dismissed as the debased and silly product of an incipient mass culture, this figure's ubiquitous presence and the narratives of submission and terror to which it is linked should be understood as signaling a response to the period's perilously unstable economy. Indeed, while sensationalist narratives of financial failure became increasingly common in the years following the devastating Panic of 1837, perhaps none registered so fully the social trauma brought about by the boom-and-bust economy than those depicting masculine crises of debt and financial panic. In scenes ranging from the famous encounter between the slave trader Haley and Mr. Shelby in Uncle Tom's Cabin ("If you knew the man as I do, you'd think that we had had a narrow escape," Shelby tells his wife after selling Uncle Tom to pay his debts) to the many depictions of panicked debtors and persecutory creditors in urban dime novels, these stories reflect the emergence of a new form of professional masculinity, one intimately linked to the vicissitudes of a panic-prone economic market.¹

The gender formation I am describing—which I call debtor masculinity—began taking shape during the financial revolutions of the 1790s and cohered in the interval between the two Panics of 1837 and 1857. Characterized primarily by excessive states of panic and hysteria and by postures of submission and humiliation, the debtor male embodied anxieties over an economy based increasingly on the ephemeral foundation of credit, speculation, and paper money. More specifically, he threatened to undermine the stable forms of self-possession and embodiment crucial to ideologies of individualism and middle-class manhood emerging during this period. Writing about the shift toward a credit-based, paper economy in eighteenth-century England, J. G. A. Pocock notes that during this period property was "acknowledged as the social basis of personality" and concludes, therefore, that "the emergence of classes whose property consisted not of lands or goods or even bullion, but of paper promises to repay in an undefined future, was seen as entailing the emergence of new types of personality, unprecedentedly dangerous and unstable."² The antebellum period's debtor male—fiscally irresponsible, emotionally mercurial, and suffering a crisis of autonomy and self-possession—best captures the American variant on exactly the kind of "new personality" Pocock describes. The infamous John White Webster (who after murdering his colleague and creditor, John Parkman, sought to hide the crime by dismembering Parkman's body and dissolving portions of it in buckets of acid) might thus be thought of less as an aberration than as a representative of this new masculine sensibility. For while Webster's gruesome efforts to dispose of Parkman's corpse certainly had to do with fear of detection and public exposure, they can also be understood as the hysterical attempt to repress the humiliating and uncanny mirror image of his own failed...