Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840-1860

Notes

Notes Introduction The epigraph for this chapter is from Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot (1835), trans. Burton Raffel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 15. The French author Balzac found inspiration for this passage in Paris. 1. Q. K. Philander Doesticks [Mortimer Thomson], Doesticks; What He Says (New York: E. Livermore, 1855). 2. Janis P. Stout’s definition of cities will serve in this study: simply, “large agglomerations of dense population, structures, and ready commodities.” From Stout’s Sodoms in Eden: The City in American Fiction Before 1860 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976), 4. 3. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 13–36. See also Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 91–114; and David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 1–37. For commentary on the modern in America, see Lewis Perry’s Boats Against the Current: American Culture Between Revolution and Modernity, 1820–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), which argues for the rise of the American modern in the decades before the Civil War. In No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), T. J. Jackson Lears by contrast conventionally marks the United States’s emergence into the modern at the end of the Civil War, after which date he additionally posits the national rise of anti-modernism. 4. For more on nineteenth-century Europe’s urban residential patterns— and the literary forms that both accompanied and informed them—see Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 5. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt Wolf (New York: Free, 1950), 409. 6. Betsy Klimasmith, At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850–1930 (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2005), 39. 7. R. W. Emerson, March 20, 1842, from The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–82), 8:204. 267 8. Fuller, in a letter to friend James Freeman Clarke, August 14, 1845, from The Letters of Margaret Fuller, ed. Robert N. Hudspeth, 6 vols. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983–94), 4:136. 9. Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005). 10. As Theo Davis explains, the very concept of “experience” carried a precise meaning for authors in the nineteenth-century United States. Davis states that American writers from the period understood “experience” to possess “form . . . as a necessary condition upon which it [literature] can come into being.” Literary Americans, that is to say,“did not think of experience, particularly of the experience relevant to texts, as [an] undistinguishable subjective category.” “Experience,” rather, was understood to be “a discrete integrity apart from the particularity of individual subjects,” while literature itself was considered “a form of being governed entirely by the typical”—with Davis describing “the experience” of a contemporary text “as a composition made from the analytic narration of emblematic images.” See Theo Davis, Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 27–28. 11. Postmodern theorists highlight a distinction between personal “place” and impersonal “space.” According to this logic, which I employ here, “place” is a known, non-abstract quantity, capable of inspiring emotional attachment. By contrast, “space” is comparatively abstract, unknown, and uninspiring; it fills the hypothetical void between “places.” See Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); and Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1998), 43–75. 12. Lloyd Pratt, Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 13. Alter, Imagined Cities, ix, 145; and Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (New York: Norton, 1996), 176; Klimasmith, At Home in the City, 1–10; Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 49–115; and Raymond Williams, The Country...