Hospitality and the Transatlantic Imagination, 1815–1835 by Cynthia Schoolar Williams (review)

With his late work on “hospitality,” Jacques Derrida bequeathed fresh powers of deconstruction to literary study, in the knotting and unknotting of vexed relations between host and guest that he termed hostipitality. Contemporary pressures of immigration, border incursion, refugee status, and “stand your ground” laws support the seriousness of this topic. To date, hospitality studies remain loyal to their origins in desert ethics and classical epics—somewhat un-deconstructed, that is, and defanged. Can Romantic studies draw this work from myth to history, inflecting it with the destinies of individuals and nations? Cynthia Schoolar Williams deftly works toward this end, excavating Anglo-American formations around hospitality in the work of four writers active after the Napoleonic wars.

With ongoing claims to such historically germane epistemes as cosmopolitanism and “imagined communities,” Orientalism and domesticity, Romantic studies appear ripe for hospitality studies. Two subtle and stimulating works, Peter Melville’s Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation (2007) and David Simpson’s Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (2013), look to British writers, primarily canonical, for home ground: against a British “host” they place the figure of “the stranger” as problematic “guest.” In Hospitality and the Transatlantic Imagination, 1815–1835, Williams adopts an offshore vantage point, taking as her emblematic figure the “alienated familiar.” She depicts Anglo-American encounters in Mary Shelley’s Lodore, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot, and the “Bracebridge Hall” series in Washington Irving’s book of that name and its forerunner The Sketch Book, while Felicia Hemans’s poetry carries Williams’s intimate estrangements worldwide. Williams’s choices allow her implicitly to press Derrida’s concession that “hospitality” is “a conjugal model, paternal and phallogocentric” featuring “the familial despot” as “the master of the house” (Of Hospitality [2000] p. 149), while benefitting from Tracy McNulty’s The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Exploration of Identity (2007).

The introduction, “Keeping Hospitality,” reprises the topic’s mythic and philosophical “tools” as a prelude to the volume’s study of domestic thresholds that overlie nascent national borders and thus implicate ideologies of hospitality. Otherwise triumphant after Waterloo, Britain faces a United States with hardening borders and new territories drawing fresh emigration from Britain. Williams deploys William Cobbett and Walter Scott to highlight a “quintessentially English” hospitality, with destabilizing origins nonetheless in “the tenant feast” that Cobbett finds better observed in Tidewater America and “the Highland feast” that brokers English nationalism.

For Williams, the looping plot of Shelley’s Lodore first locates a British father and daughter in republican America; the daughter survives to return “home” to an England on the eve of Reform and a family riven by Derrida’s paternal “despotism”; cultural and familial estrangement conclude in the mother’s table-turning act as English “host.” Set fifty years earlier, during the Revolutionary War, Cooper’s The Pilot features a colonial loyalist paterfamilias resettled uneasily in Northumbria, the object of capture by marauding Americans who have already won the hearts of his daughter and ward. The resulting coastal raids are guided by a disaffected mercenary, John Paul Jones in disguise. For Williams, this novel replaces “English hospitality” with an ambiguous “sailor’s welcome” and penetrates the seeming impregnability of England’s border, its rocky, foggy coastline.

The “Bracebridge” sketches of Washington Irving would also prize (in both senses) English hospitality, in this case by penetrating America’s fatherland. Yet, once admitted as an “intimate stranger” (p. 114), the traveler finds the tenant feast and similar lordly-led frolics deferred into antiquarian musings and faulty revivals. The Irving chapter invites a more diachronic dimension (evident later in the book’s eloquent Coda), whether literary—Irving dedicates The Sketch Book to Scott and influences Dickens—or political—given his ministerial duties in London and Madrid. Meanwhile, Irving’s sketch “Roscoe” deserves more than a footnote (n. 46, p. 205): free of “Merry England’s” mystique, William Roscoe’s high-bourgeois hospitality in Liverpool enriched both Irving’s mercantile stay...