Identifying Marks: Race, Gender, and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-Century America

Notes

notes Introduction: “Carved in Flesh” 1. The discourse of disability can also be considered in this context since it functions here in much the same way as race and gender. Disabilities are often regarded as “natural” and wholly defining of one’s personality and identity. A primary example of this type of character in nineteenth-century American literature is the hunchback Deb from Rebecca Harding Davis’s novella Life in the Iron Mills. Yet as Thomson points out in Extraordinary Bodies, “disability is a representation, a cultural interpretation of physical transformation or configuration, and a comparison of bodies that structures social relations and institutions. Disability, then, is the attribution of corporeal deviance—not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do” (6). For more on disability as a social construct, see Stone; Bogdan; Hevey; Liachowitz; Davis; and Thomson, Freakery. I touch on the intersection between disability and gender in chapter 2. 2. This is not to say that Hester in any way takes pleasure in the wearing of the letter. In fact, the moments when she does seem to feel pleasure—interacting with her daughter, Pearl, and talking to Dimmesdale in the forest—are the moments when the letter particularly galls her. As the scene in the forest shows, Pearl also demands that her mother wear the letter when she does not wish to, thus enacting power over her that is eventually denied the magistrates themselves. One. Capturing Identity in Ink: Tattooing and the White Captive 1. According to Mifflin, Martin Hildebrandt was a German immigrant who opened the first professional tattoo studio in New York in the 1840s. He made his living tattooing sailors, performers, and, during the Civil War, both Union and Confederate soldiers (10). See also Sanders. 2. For more on Buffalo Bill, see Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, especially chapter 5, “American Indian Performers in the Wild West.” 3. For more on tattooed performers in the United States and abroad, see Bogdan 241– 56 and Oettermann. For more on “tattooed ladies” and their performances in museums, freak shows, and circuses, see Mifflin 10–32. 4. See especially Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality. 5. Morrison notes a similar dynamic in Playing in the Dark. She writes, “As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this” (17). 163 164 • Notes to Chapter One 6. Such distinctions make for fascinating conversations about Typee, both in scholarship and in the classroom. But this conversation is not served by scholars who both dismiss the importance of genre and make Melville out to be the exception in his adaptation of multiple generic conventions in nineteenth-century America. One such scholar is John Bryant, who in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Typee insists, “This book is not a novel.” He goes on to say that the text has characteristics of the novel, the autobiography, the travel book, and the anthropological study. He concludes, however, by claiming that “it is best to come to Typee divested of any preconceived expectations of form” and asserting that “[o]ne might as well call [Typee] just a piece of writing” (xi). This employment of multiple genres and generic conventions is actually quite common in the work of antebellum authors such as Caroline Kirkland, Fanny Fern, and Hannah Crafts. Many of their texts, however, have been dismissed as sophomoric and unsophisticated because of such complexities. 7. Many critics have commented on tattooing in Typee, citing it as one of the threats— the other being cannibalism—that prompt Tommo to leave Typee Valley. See Dryden; Abrams; and Ruland. For more recent analyses of tattooing in Typee, see Evelev and Otter 9–49. Ultimately, I agree with Otter that tattooing, rather than cannibalism, is the primary impetus for Tommo’s escape. 8. I am assuming that, given the importance of tattooing in the novel, Melville would have made explicit mention of any tattoos received on board ship. Although many sailors were tattooed during the time in which the novel is set, Tommo does not seem to be. Without any...