Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature (review)

Sympathy, family, fraternity, kinship—recent scholarship on early U.S. culture has been keen to show how the nation organized itself around these and other conceptions of affiliation and ways of imagining a polity. Perfecting Friendshipenters this ongoing conversation to make a remarkably convincing case for “friendship” as a central organizing trope of American culture. Its subject is not friendship as a set of cultural practices but rather the way the trope of friendship organized an array of social and political phenomena. In order to make this argument, Schweitzer draws on scholarship about friendship in other periods and national contexts. But its most ambitious framing move is its treatment of friendship as a philosophical topos from Greek antiquity down to its treatments in contemporary theory and philosophy—a task that the work’s long first chapter accomplishes admirably. Against this background, Schweitzer’s rigorously researched study provides fresh perspectives on even well-trodden works in the American canon.

The biggest challenge the work sets for itself is an organizational one: how to give a thick description of the role of “friendship discourses” in a focused literary archive (its literary center of gravity is the three-decade period from Hannah Foster’s Coquetteand Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie), while simultaneously accounting for the deep history of the concept of friendship in Western culture. Chapter 1, as already mentioned, lays out the history of friendship theory across the longue duréefrom its classical formulation through its reconfigurations in medieval and early modern European thought. Chapter 2 then takes up the role of friendship in John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon “A Modell of Christian Charitie,” while chapters 3 through 5 offer three “snapshots” of friendship in American novels, treating in turn Foster’s The Coquette, Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, and Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie. As will be clear from this outline, the goal is not a chapter sequence that balances its weight evenly across the periods in question. Rather, the book reiterates at the level of structure one of its central arguments: that a classical Aristotelian ideal of friendship had a radical “portability,” and thus that we can observe the persistence and rearticulation of “the cultural and political meanings of same-sex affiliation in various historical moments and . . . among surprisingly diverse populations” (5). But this is a history also deeply interested in the changes the concept undergoes along the way. For since the Aristotelian model of friendship stresses the similitude and even equivalence of its parties, what is of greatest interest to Schweitzer is what happens to that classical ideal when it is forced to contend with racial, sexual, and class differences.

Perfecting Friendshipis full of nuanced readings, long on both insight and subtlety. Even as she treats a series of literary texts that have generated notoriously charged ideology critiques, Schweitzer refuses to force ideological closure on her readings. The common thread is that friendship does not only “persist” but does so across “various ideological deployments and transformations” and with “contradictory effects—at once inclusive and exclusive, oppressive and empowering” (210). Yet it is safe to say that Schweitzer emphasizes the sense of politico-ethical possibility and hopefulness in these instances of literary friendship. Where the recent critical accounts focusing on plots of kinship and courtship have tended to focus on the more troubling ideological work these narratives performed, Schweitzer’s reaccentuation of the dynamics of friendship seems to go hand in hand with her attention to the positive ethical possibilities that, even if unrealized, coexisted with those political failures.

Schweitzer acknowledges and draws on existing work about friendship in early American culture, but she also suggests that we have failed fully to recognize its political, social, and literary importance. In readings of particular works like Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, for example, she argues that “a persistent myopia about the presence and function of friendship as a structuring affiliation” (135) has kept friendship themes out of...