Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776–1858 (review)

Remodeling the Nation begins with an anecdote long familiar to historians of political rhetoric in the years leading up to the Civil War. Standing somewhat awkwardly before a crowd at the Illinois State House in Springfield in 1858, Lincoln reaches into his remembered gospel texts and pulled out the phrase “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” In Faherty’s hands, these words encapsulate the metaphor that drives this study—that the nation is conceived as a house. Or, as he has it, “I trace the complex evolution of this recursive figuration of the domestic houses as the wellspring of national identity” (5). In five chapters, he delivers precisely such a figuration as he moves chronologically from Virginia in the 1770s to Pennsylvania in the 1790s, to early nineteenthcentury New York, and finally, to a rumination on Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. The final pages of the text conclude with one subtle meditation on Melville’s “I and My Chimney” of 1856.

Indeed, Faherty’s method for determining what each putative chapter will include merits comment. For just as his final fifth chapter brings readings of Poe’s “The Light-House” (1849) into contact with Hawthorne’s “Sights from a Steeple” (1831) and The Scarlet Letter (1850), as well as the Melville story, so too do his other chapters combine elements both familiar and unfamiliar into pastiches that can be at once arresting and entertaining. Take, for instance, his remarkable second chapter, that carries the title “ ‘No Longer Assigned Its Ancient Use’: Biloquial Architecture and the Problems of Remodeling.” It moves something like this: Nominally, we hear first of the difficulties and accomplishments of William Bartram, whose father John was a luminary in Philadelphia learned society. By contrast, young William had difficulty finding his autonomous voice. After unsuccessfully trying his hand at running a plantation his father had purchased for him in Florida, and then mooching again off his father’s largesse back in Philadelphia, William travels in the 1770s in the South, among the English, the Creeks, and the Choctaws. He finally penned a record of his travels that found ruin and desolation wherever he turned. And as Faherty carefully notes, he was writing this litany of loss in Philadelphia in 1791, the city that defined the constitutional ethos of the new nation. As he asserts, the “political implications” of Bartram’s Travels derives from “his taxonomic collection of failed settlement patterns, the collective weight of which testifies to the uncertainties facing the possibilities for national expansion and national stability” (40). He now moves into a prolonged discussion of two of Charles Brockden Brown’s well-known novels, Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1800), the readings of which owe a debt to the work of, among others, Christopher Looby, but attain a level of Brownian complexity which cannot effectively be summarized here. The final section of this chapter takes its cue from the “national expansion” mandate, and carries the reader along with Lewis and Clark to their construction of Fort Clatsop in November 1805; the image of the fort’s plan (72, Figure 4) taken down by Clark on the cover of his field book suggests the importance of even minimalist understandings of domestic space to the business of holding steady those slipping signifiers of the quest for “national stability.” Each chapter contains a set of texts, usually (but not always, since recursion appears) arranged chronologically.

Faherty is often at pains to bring other scholars into discussion, so much so that his work at times risks seeming derivative. The first chapter seems a case in point. In order to ground the idea that building a house can be (and was) continuous through metaphor as building a nation, he takes us to Jefferson’s small mountaintop outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, and to the plantation that Washington inherited from his sisterin-law in the late 1750s. Given the monticello of diaries, accounts, drawings, and correspondence that documents...