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American Literature 76.1 (2004) 1-29



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Periodizing Authorship, Characterizing Genre:

Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Benevolent Literacy Narratives

Kennesaw State University

The favored class of society," wrote Catharine Maria Sedgwick in 1848, "owe an immense debt to Providence, which can only be discharged by attempting to rescue the vicious and ignorant from misery and degradation."1 Casting herself as a patrician with benevolent obligations, Sedgwick provides a key not only to her intentions for much of her work at mid-career but also to the shortage of scholarship on these didactic texts of the 1830s and 1840s. Despite our likely discomfort today with Sedgwick's class-based agenda for social reform, the narratives from the middle of her career deserve attention for what they reveal about the intersection of literature and the literacy-based educational programs of uplift that many antebellum women writers helped to establish during this time. These writers intended to shape cross-class relationships while promoting literacy-based educational programs as central to American literary culture.

My examination of two works by Sedgwick from this time period, Live and Let Live (1837) and The Boy of Mount Rhigi (1848), is a small step toward the larger project of bringing sociological studies of the structure of class relations to analyses of American literature and to constructions of American literary history. As Klaus Eder has pointed out, a structural analysis of class can reveal the mechanisms by which power in the "systems of social positions" is produced and reproduced.2 Positioning texts by these antebellum women writers within a matrix of cross-class relationships that includes both programs of social uplift and their seemingly contradictory elements of class containment clarifies the texts' historical significance. This move also [End Page 1] foregrounds cross-class relations and the literature about managing them as a springboard for further scholarship.

The claim that Sedgwick is an important literary figure has rested primarily on Hope Leslie (1827), which appeared in an accessible edition just when feminist scholars were beginning to construct a canon of nineteenth-century American women's literature. Since then, Sedgwick's prominent position in many major literary anthologies has secured her a relatively stable spot in histories of American literature. Although Douglas Ford points to "Sedgwick's neglected position in the canon" and Judith Fetterley has argued that Hope Leslie is "one of the most underanalyzed texts of nineteenth-century American literature," the novel does appear regularly on course syllabi now (judging from sales figures), and it continues to generate scholarship.3 Sedgwick is not likely to inspire as many essays as Hawthorne does or a special issue of American Literature like the one devoted to Melville in 1994, but she has nonetheless garnered enough attention to produce a scholarly society of her own and a growing body of criticism.4

And yet Fetterley has suggested that the critical emphasis on the worthiness of texts like Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Wide, Wide World may have discouraged other approaches, especially readings that seek a balance between over- and undervaluing such texts.5 As Fetterley emphasizes, "[I]f this generation of critics does not write the literary history of these writers, it will be all too easy for the texts we have recovered to disappear again."6 Historicizing women writers' careers rather than concentrating on a favored text can help prevent this disappearance as well as clarify the authors' positions in American literary history.7 As Joanne Dobson has shown in her astute reconsideration of sentimentalism, an equally productive approach for work on nineteenth-century American women writers at this point is to draw on genre as a tool and an object of study.8 Accordingly, my bringing together these interpretive strategies—periodizing authorship and characterizing genre—to examine two of Sedgwick's most popular, but critically neglected, narratives will, I hope, broaden and complicate the history of Sedgwick's career.

Sedgwick's genre choices in the second and third decades of her publishing career drew heavily on a class-inflected agenda. Reading through records of her own...

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