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Reviews in American History 29.4 (2001) 523-529



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Peddling Stories

Mary Kelley


Ann Fabian. The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xi + 255 pp. Notes, illustrations, and index. $39.95 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).

Convicts, beggars, soldiers, and slaves fill the pages of Unvarnished Truth, a strikingly original narrative of tales told by the marginalized of nineteenth-century America. Beggars fall victim to nefarious forces that leave them without resources--except for the tales they turn into profit. Notorious criminals stand before the gallows telling stories of lives gone awry. Slaves flee North armed with autobiographies designed to advance the cause of emancipation. And soldiers retail manly bravery in recollections of the suffering and sacrifice endured in the prisons of the Confederacy.

Denied significance by the conventions of Clio's discipline, these Americans were supposed to be lost to history. Not the successful strivers who enliven the pages of Joyce Appleby's Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (2000), these poor, obscure, and powerless individuals were tucked away in the recesses of the nineteenth century. However, they refused consignment to oblivion, insisting instead that their experiences be told. At least in their own time and in the publication of their personal narratives, they fulfilled their ambitions. Enabled by an expanding print culture and high literacy rates, they succeeded in reaching a broad and diverse audience with their stories. Then, overlooked by chroniclers of the past, they were forgotten until Ann Fabian rediscovered their tales and restored them to today's readers.

Unvarnished Truth testifies to the increasing interest in autobiographical narrative, both as a subject in its own right and as a vehicle for exploring larger social and cultural meanings in nineteenth-century America. Witness the recent publication of Appleby's Inheriting the Revolution, Mechal Sobel's Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era (2000), and Stephen Arch's After Franklin: The Emergence of Autobiography in Post-Revolutionary America, 1780-1830 (2001). All these scholars explore the constitution of American selves through cultural forms they variously label "published autobiographies" (Appleby), "life narratives" (Sobel), and "self-biographies" [End Page 523] (Arch). The approaches range from literary critic Arch's recovery of neglected texts and discursive practices to Sobel's inquiry into dreams as a forum for fashioning the self. At first glance, Fabian's Unvarnished Truth appears to bear the closest resemblance to Appleby's Inheriting the Revolution. Both take as their subject the experiences of ordinary Americans; both concern themselves with the formation of self and social identities in post-Revolutionary America; and both assemble hundreds of narratives as an evidentiary basis. However, Fabian stands in contrast to Appleby, who restricts her selection to those who "did something in public--started a business, invented a useful object, settled a town, organized a movement, ran for office, formed an association, or wrote for publication." 1 Despite the fact that Fabian's convicts, beggars, soldiers, and slaves meet the last of Appleby's criteria, they differ fundamentally from Appleby's primary subjects, successful white men who universalized their experience and defined for a heterogeneous population what it meant to be an American. Fabian's cast of characters are constituted from the obverse, the darker side of a post-Revolutionary America that lurks in Appleby's volume, becoming manifest in the pages dedicated to the persistence of a slavery that denied black men and women all rights and white women political and legal rights. Read together, Fabian and Appleby provide us with a more complicated narration of an America peopled by men and women with an enormous variety of identities and affinities.

In what she aptly describes as a "social history of a cultural form" (p. 4), Fabian relies upon three types of autobiographies--confessional, captivity, and slave narratives. Whatever the form a particular author chose, those inhabiting Fabian's history produced texts that were distinguished by the shape of the stories they told and the strategies with which the authors bolstered their claims to authenticity. All of these authors claimed a truth that...

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