In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

American Literary History 15.1 (2003) 39-60



[Access article in PDF]

Becoming Multicultural

Susan Mizruchi

[Figures]

This country has "always already" been multicultural. 1 Yet not until the second half of the nineteenth century were the specific stakes of this diversity widely conceptualized and debated. Novels of the time, extending into the first two decades of the twentieth century, provide a critical forum for these conceptualizations and debates. Sometimes they do so through a focus on the death industries of war and slavery (Maria Ruiz de Burton's Who Would Have Thought It? [1872] and Frances Harper's Iola Leroy [1892]); sometimes through a concern with the work of mourning for a lost culture (Charles Eastman's Indian Boyhood [1902] and Mary Antin's The Promised Land [1912]); sometimes through descriptions of the inner workings of new business enterprises such as magazines or clothing manufacture (William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes [1890] and Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky [1917]) or through pleas for industrial reform (Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner [1871] and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle [1906]). Crosscultural comparison was a mainstay of social observation not only in notoriously heterogeneous urban settings, but in towns and rural areas as well. This was the era of America's self-consciousness about its extraordinary diversity—the era, that is, of its multicultural becoming—and rising rates of immigration and growing perceptions of the world's interconnectedness served daily assault on the forces of parochialism. 2

The challenge of my section of literary history is to convey the breadth and complexity of these developments, while at the same time capturing the variety of ways in which American novels responded. To this end, I have identified two main subject areas, which encompass large cross-sections of cultural and economic activity: death as cultural practice and economy and business. In what follows I offer examples of each of these areas of concern, indicating as I do so the range and interests under consideration and my method of investigation. My objects of analysis will be primarily novels and other narratives—for instance, memoirs, biographies, journalism, treatises by social analysts (Henry George), theologians (Mary Baker Eddy), reformers (Jane Addams), [End Page 39] and corporate heads (Andrew Carnegie). But I will also be analyzing photographs and other images, including advertising images. I have chosen in this essay to base my arguments on images rather than texts for two reasons. First, images create an immediate community (however discordant) of interpretation by allowing for the reproduction of an object of analysis that is readily shared with magazine readers (whether early-twentieth-century readers of McClure's or early-twenty-first-century readers of ALH). Second, my use of images allows me to make a particular point about visual form: that it tends to address us subliminally, to speak to a "sixth sense" in all of us, which I would specify as a cultural sense. I would argue that this cultural sense can be evoked by images that are personal (a photograph of one's grandmother) and those that are public (a Civil War battlefield); by the most solemn (Alexander Gardner's "Burial Party") as well as the most patronizing (E. Morgan's Sons "House of Sapolio" ad).

1

Death rituals serve in all cultures to negotiate the ultimate experience of estrangement—the conversion of what's intimate (child, mother, spouse, friend) into the Other. In post-Civil War America such rituals also worked to distinguish relative states ofkinship and strangeness among native-born, migrant, and immigrant. This is why death practices were central to ethnography inthese decades. According to H. C. Yarrow, who oversaw the American Bureau of Ethnography's 23-year (1871-1894) research into the burial mounds of North American Indians, "no particular part of ethnographic research has claimed more attention" (87). For followers of Samuel George Morton, the antebellum originator of scientific ethnology, and one of the first to exploit the multicultural implications of sacred gravesites, the skulls and bones buried there provided an encyclopedia of knowledge about human diversity. In keeping with dominant theories...

pdf

Share