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  • Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States by William Huntting Howell
  • Katie Simon (bio)
Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States by William Huntting Howell
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
vi+306 pp. US$49.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-4703-9.

Original and ambitious, this book substantially revises a familiar crux topic in early American literary studies. William Huntting Howell breathes new life into the idea of self-reliance by examining its prehistory. He finds an early America that valorized imitation, the copy, and iteration; it was a time before the Romantic Emersonian notion of an original, singular genius took hold. The purpose of such a project is two-fold. On the one hand, it adds to the historiography of the eighteenth century, presenting careful and compelling evidence of a widespread ethos of emulation in literary, artistic, and behavioural practices in early America, an era in which “the arts of dependence” were ubiquitous. The book’s real value, however, lies in its second purpose, in the historicized groundwork it provides for alternative understandings of subjectivity and for theorizing individuality outside the dominant frame of liberal individualism. This project would interest scholars in many fields.

For early Americanists, Howell offers ingenious new readings of familiar and not-so-familiar texts alongside a valuable historiography of inadequately studied objects of the Republican era. He pairs canonical works like Benjamin Franklin’s The Autobiography and Herman Melville’s [End Page 336] Moby-Dick; or the Whale with less studied texts like Phillis Wheatley’s occasional verse and Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novel Ormond; Or, The Secret Witness. Two well-researched chapters of historiography interrogate a prodigious archive that, in Howell’s hands, illuminates our understanding of the emulative, dependent nature of Republican subjectivity. One such chapter considers David Rittenhouse’s clockwork solar systems and specie-minting devices in the context of essays on education and on the nature of mind by Benjamin Rush; another chapter examines female pedagogical tools such as readers, writing books, embroidered samplers, and fabric globes. Howell uses this historiography of material culture to expand our notions of intersubjectivity and deferential modes of being in early American literature, building tangible bridges between the practical arts and literary representation. The result is not only a resonant illumination of how subjectivity was understood on the ground in the late eighteenth century, but also a glimpse of how we might understand alternative publics and versions of self outside our dominant frames of understanding selfhood today.

In his first chapter, “Imitatio Franklin, or the American Example,” Howell turns the standard reading of Franklin’s Autobiography on its head, offering a long overdue reconsideration of the status of emulation, imitation, and iteration in a text critically and popularly accepted as purveying exemplary self-reliance. Most scholarly readings of Franklin’s self-representation accept selfhood as sovereign and bounded, the product of independence and defiance of others, the result of do-it-yourself secular reformation and rebirth. Limitations imposed by social, familial, religious, and cultural restraints are seemingly eschewed in Franklin’s text, as over two hundred years of scholarship have noted. And yet, Howell provides a richly contextualized reading demonstrating how thickly interdependent Franklin’s persona and text are with the arts and ideas of others, and how seriously he himself values the art of imitation. Howell’s revisionary reading could have implications beyond the literary, given the persistence of a critical and cultural attachment to Franklin’s icon as an exemplar of individualism and self-reliance.

Another interesting chapter, entitled “The Republican Girl and the Spirit of Emulation,” begins with an analysis of two anonymously authored textbooks for girls attributed to Susanna Rowson, and ends with a detailed historiography of embroidery samplers and other needle crafts produced in girls’ schools in the Revolutionary era. While such data is useful for furthering the discussion of imitation, reproducibility, and iteration that Howell’s project entails, his analysis gestures to broader ideas about Republican subjectivity that would make this [End Page 337] chapter valuable in fields beyond the material and ornamental arts. If feminist historians have neglected this archive in search of...

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