The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (review)

In this exemplary work, Stacey Margolis critically redefines the boundaries of public and private life in nineteenth-century American fiction and culture. Margolis’s well-structured examination rethinks the ideology privileging privacy and the “exploration of interiority” in American literature (3). She bases her understanding of American identity formation on the exterior constructions and public actions of several characters in a variety of novels. According to Margolis, these characters “can only be understood—can only understand themselves—through the production of public effects” (3). She thoughtfully constructs her argument in sections that defy traditional understandings of American literature by pairing canonical and non-canonical texts to examine aspects of private and public life from multiple vantage points. She also seamlessly combines historical, cultural, and psychoanalytic approaches to her subject matter. Ultimately, Margolis reveals how diverse writers show that characters’ self-understandings and public images are derived from public actions.

The first section of The Public Life of Privacy focuses on voluntary and involuntary group association. In Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Margolis argues, the communal society becomes a “mirror” for Coverdale to understand his opinions in relation to group acceptance (8). Paradoxically, in Hawthorne’s commune, the group publicly expresses the desires of individuals while shaping the individuals into the community’s image. Margolis makes many identity- related references to mirrors in this discussion; however, these references are never directly connected to the theories of Jacques Lacan. Such an inclusion would have provided an interesting theoretical dimension to Margolis’s discussion of how these works of fiction escape the boundaries of “Foucauldian terms of surveillance and discipline” (2). Instead, Margolis refers extensively to Charles Fourier’s theories of association.

Next, Margolis examines another non-liberal identity formation in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World. She argues that the main character, Ellen, departs from the courses of action usual in girls’ novels by failing to learn to conceal her emotions; she also does not learn from her unsuccessful self-regulation. Ellen makes mistakes so that her adopted brother/husband John will continue to educate her through criticism, but she continually fails in that education, requiring further “punishment” (55). For Margolis, the domestic sphere thereby forms women’s identity, acting as a “kind of feedback loop through which one discovers one’s effects on the world” (55). She acknowledges the work of Jane Tompkins and Marianne Noble but respectfully challenges their validation of Ellen’s behavior through the discovery of an empowering subtext in The Wide, Wide World; instead, Margolis sees Warner’s novel as an evaluation of how Ellen went wrong in her quest for true womanhood.

In the next section, buttressed by impressive historical and critical footnotes, Margolis tackles post-Reconstruction legal issues, including segregation and negligence, in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House behind the Cedars. Margolis argues that Huck’s feelings about Jim are not as important as his action of monetary compensation, which mimics contemporary negligence laws. In another unique interpretation of privacy and identity, Margolis analyzes Chesnutt’s narrative of passing as “willed identity” based on public perception of the exterior self, which shapes interiority (109). The legal issues discussed nicely support her thesis of publicly formed identity in a time of racial conflict.

In the final section, Margolis looks at the limits of desire in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood and Henry James’s The Sacred Fount. She treads delicately when examining race alongside the so-called perversions of addiction and homosexuality— what she calls the “rhetoric of addiction as desire” (143). Society believed the drug replaced the addict’s will with “its own monstrous agency” (144). With some difficulty, Margolis connects Hopkins to this discourse by claiming that inherited collective racial identity possesses Hopkins’s characters. While some critics claim Hopkins uses the racist “one-drop rule” (109), Margolis, citing Susan Gillman and Thomas Otten, defends Hopkins, claiming that...