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INTRODUCTION Remapping the Nineteenth-Century Literary Landscape This is a common cause; and if there is any burden to be borne in the Anti-Slavery cause—anything to be done to weaken our hateful chains or assert our manhood and womanhood, I have a right to do my share of the work.—Frances E.W.Harper, "I Havea Right to Do My Share" But if you ask me what offices [women] may fill; I reply—any. I do not carewhat case you put; let them be sea-captains, if you will.—Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.—WaltWhitman, Leaves of Grass When the escaped slave Harriet Jacobs received a letter from her owner'sfamily attempting to trick her into returning to the South, she recognizedthe snare and commented: "Verily, he relied too much on 'the stupidity of the African race/" Published in 1861, Jacobs's remark may just as well have been directed at many Americans who—impressed with scientists7 "proof" ofNegro inferiority —had been lulled into a false sense of racial superiority. As this anecdote suggests, the first half of the nineteenth century ushered in an era ofpowerful scientific and quasi-scientific disciplines that assumed permanent and innate difference between the "types" of humankind. A new set of scientific "laws," supposedly establishing the physical inferiority of women, Negroes, andAboriginals , were said by some proponents of slavery and opponents of women's rights to replace the Declaration of Independence's "higher law." For many American writers, who connected the individual body symbolically with the body politic, the new science was fraught with possibility and peril. This book explores the representation of the body in the work of seven authors: Lydia 2 F L E S H I N G OUT A M E R I C A Maria Child, Frances E. W. Harper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin R. Delany. These writers were involved to some degree with women's rights or abolition or both, yet respond to these movements and the changing conceptions of the body in diverging, even conflicting, ways. Rarely, then, does this book posit a binary of scientific action and literary reaction. Rather, it investigates how these authors struggled in a tumultuous period to flesh out America, to grapple, in other words, with the discourses of abolition, women's rights, and science—all of which had the cumulative effect of debunking the myth of the disembodied "person" ofRevolutionary rhetoric. This rhetoric held forth the promise of natural and higher laws of innate equality, but often masked the reality that political rights were allocated only to those who inhabited bodies marked white and male. Karen Sanchez-Eppler summarizes the corporeal paradox of Revolutionary rhetoric: "All the 'men7 who, Thomas Jefferson declared, 'are created equal' shed their gender and their race,- in obtaining the right to freedom and equality they discard bodily specificity." By the decades preceding the Civil War, the theoryof an allegedly disembodied "person" entitled to political rights was no longer rhetorically valid. Rather, as Sanchez-Eppler argues, "the development of a political discourse and a concept of personhood that attests to the centrality of the body erupts throughout antebellum culture."1 The authors my book studies assume their place in the mid-nineteenth-century contest to demarcate the body of the nation. A century and a half later, antebellum theories of identity may strike us as remnants of a lamentable past. Yeteven though they have been discredited, can we argue that they do not reverberate in our society today? One of the nineteenth century's legacies to this one is a vague, yet significant, sense in many Americans that race, gender, and sexuality are natural categories of difference. For this reason, my study joins late-twentieth-century efforts to explore the historical construction of the categories that define us in an effort to move beyond the polarization that is deeply rooted in our culture. Although these authors' representations of corporeality merit study in their own right, this project is in part also an attempt to forge answers to some contemporary pedagogical and theoretical problems I find troubling. As my reliance upon scholars such as Michel Foucault indicates, I am resistant to the idea that physiological essentialism can be knowably "true," and instead I explore nineteenth-century science as a discourse that connects in complex ways knowledge and power. Our embodied experiences are united inextricably to our...

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