Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville's Democracy in America

Conclusion: Family, Gender, and Democratic Maturity

Conclusion: Family, Gender, and Democratic Maturity “For we all of us get our thoughts entangled in metaphors and act fatally on the strength of them.”1 —George Eliot THE WORK OF THIS BOOK involves illustrating points of contact between the gendered and familial narrative that frames Democracy inAmerica,and Dorothy Dinnerstein’s (as well as Erik Erikson’s) theory of human development. At many points,Tocqueville presses us to consider the problem of how democracy ,as symbolic youth,and its citizens can grow up by integrating,rather than splitting off and repressing, disparate identity elements and passions, past and present.Deftly diagnosing the possibilities,dangers,and pathologies that haunt democratic society and culture,Tocqueville illuminates them by exposing the peculiar impact that his maternalized aristocracy has had on young democracy. Like Dinnerstein,Tocqueville is, above all, critic of human immaturity, of the abandonment of the responsibilities of freedom. His analysis at many turns therefore parallels Dinnerstein’s,pointing critically to the impact on society,culture , and the individual of conscious struggles for autonomy, buried yearnings for the comforts of hierarchy, and the resulting concatenation of tension-riddled passions. However, while Dinnerstein presses us to consider the limitations that modern conjugal family arrangements and attendant heterosexual gender prescriptions place on human maturation and social health,Tocqueville attempts to resolve the strains that his developing democracy faces within the bounds of the modern conjugal family ideal,both on the level of symbol and in terms of his flesh and blood democratic inhabitants.Dinnerstein’s work thus helps us 185 assess the unresolved dynamicsTocqueville builds into his text,and helps us imagine how we might, while still drawing upon the many riches of his text, reach beyond them.WhenTocqueville turns to his analysis of actual family and gender relations in U.S.democracy,the costs of his symbolic foundations are most keenly revealed as costs to individual humans; the symbolic deployment of gender and family powerfully ordains who and what these individuals can be. In this moment, the gendered, modern conjugal familial order is recognizable as premised on identities assigned to people at birth—as all too much like the elaborately ordered, differentiating, comforting and controlling world of aristocracy . (To be more precise,Tocqueville’s aristocracy is rooted in a refined array of hierarchical differentiations,while his democracy is bound up in hierarchical binary differentiation that at many turns proliferates into multiplicity.) Ultimately, although Democracy in America’s familialized narrative sometimes provides Tocqueville with a moral footing from which to judge phenomena in democracy—patriarchal absolutism proves illegitimate in politics as it is in conjugal family life;and,it is horrifying that his EuropeanAmericans murdered their Indian brethren because they are brethren—Tocqueville seems at a loss to fix the familialized context in a state of health.Indeed,his EuropeanAmericans’ violence is not prevented by their deployment of familial terms; if anything, this expression of familiarity lends them precisely the leeway they seek to commit atrocities. In short, this rereading of Tocqueville’s text exposes the varied, usually intrinsic shortcomings of the modern conjugal family ideal and its heterosexual gender arrangements for democracy. At the same time,however,let us not forget thatTocqueville’s familial and gendered tropes, deployed to define and direct his young democracy, instructively convey the pervasive impact of ideas of family and gender in democratic society and culture.Put another way,it is fruitful fully to mineTocqueville’s architectonic infant/man:developing nation analogy for all the insights it can lend. Mirroring and extending the family and gender relations that were taking root in Europe and that he discovers operating among inhabitants of his U.S. democracy,Tocqueville’s metaphorical language alerts us to how ideas of family and gender identities structure not only individual selves, but also general ideas of power,authority,submission,and self-governance.Given that these metaphors echo ideas of family and gender relations that prevailed in the nineteenth -century democratizingWest and that are still viscerally familiar to us today, they have much to say to us. Near the beginning of this book, Democracy in America’s gendered and familial symbols were said to represent more than gender and family relations among flesh and blood inhabitants of democracy.They were said also to represent a system of power, for organizing authority, opportunity for autonomy, and relations of hierarchy.Gender and family relations,however they are defined, 186 DEMOCRACY GROWING UP CONCLUSION 187 in...