America's Sketchbook: The Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Genre, and: Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Whether told by revisionists or traditionalists, the history of nineteenth-century American literature, Kristie Hamilton and Mary Louise Kete agree, has focused on the novel. Starting from this shared premise, Hamilton and Kete set out to excavate literary genres that have flown under the radar of most literary-historical grand narratives of the American nineteenth century, genres that occupied spaces coded as more intimate and private than the public arena of the novel.

For Hamilton, the missing genre in our literary histories is the antebellum literary sketch, generically associated with the “leisured privacy” of the album or diary but nevertheless “enmeshed in and central to the processes of antebellum cultural formation” (9). For Kete, the missing genre is poetry, especially sentimental poetry circulated among intimates in the shared privacy of the album. Such circulations typify the “sentimental collaborations” Kete sees as central to the formation of the nineteenth-century American middle class and, along with it, the nineteenth-century American nation. Hamilton and Kete both seek to draw our attention to what might be called the genres of the album—the sketch and the sentimental poem—as missing places in our literary maps of the nineteenth-century United States.

Hamilton’s reading of the antebellum sketch is distinctly more suspicious than is Kete’s study of the genres of the album. The intimacy of the sketch, in Hamilton’s analysis, is always already a “mass-market intimacy” (8), generated in concert with the ever growing appetites of the emergent U.S. literary marketplace. Whether set at home or abroad, in the village or the city, whether offered as the product of the bachelor-traveler’s “sauntering gaze” (in Washington Irving’s famous self-characterization) or as a localized participant-insider’s informal notations of everyday communal life (in the mode pioneered by Mary Russell Mitford), Hamilton writes, “sketch writing constituted a rationale and performance of a leisured privacy and bourgeois identity” (9).

In contrast to readings of the nineteenth-century American literary sketch as a celebration of premodern communities, Hamilton sees the sketch, in all its antebellum variety, as a mediator of modernity, part of “the cultural processes that were already replacing the centered, idealized observer of a stable, objectively known world with a decentered (transient), observing subject of flitting images and fleeting moments” (138). The sketch’s increasingly modern “aesthetic of the everyday” produced a “typology of the nation” for nineteenth-century U.S. readers, in which “places became scenes, people were transformed into characters, and events . . . were abstracted as incidents,” reliable constituent parts in a “consumable” national sense of the everyday (139).

The antebellum sketch could, however, be exploited as an entry point into authorship for writers not born to its bourgeois privacies. Thus, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl both draws on the genre’s documentary conventions and resists them, as in the chapter “Christmas Festivities,” which Hamilton identifies as “an explicit evocation and rebuttal of the middle-class, holiday sketch” (61). Similarly, Hamilton finds that the women factory workers who wrote for the Lowell Offering found their way into authorship through the medium of the sketch, laying claim to their own participation in the refinements of bourgeois privacy, while the more radical among them invoked the conventions of the sketch to expose their incapacity to represent the lives of women laborers. For Herman Melville, these struggles by factory women to engage the sketch for reformist or radical ends served as fodder for literary rather than social reformations; thus “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” Hamilton argues, mounts...