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  • Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U.S. Women's Life Writing, 1840-1890
  • Elizabeth Stockton
Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U.S. Women's Life Writing, 1840-1890. By Katherine Adams. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 264 pp. $65.00.

In 1998, Cathy N. Davidson edited a special issue of American Literature, the title of which was somewhat akin to a shout: "No More Separate Spheres!" Taking up this challenge, a range of scholars, including Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Peter Coviello, Millette Shamir, and Stacey Margolis, have since produced book-length studies that have interrogated the cultural work of the discourse of "privacy" in early American literature and culture. Contributing to this rich conversation is Katherine Adams's Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U.S. Women's Life Writing, 1840-1890, which traces how US women writers from approximately 1840 to 1890 understood—and participated in—the construction of privacy. Focusing primarily on Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Keckley, and Louisa May Alcott, the volume perceptively charts the way privacy discourse shifted over the course of the nineteenth century from facilitating "democratic inclusivity" to offering a "portrait of beleaguered individuality" (153, 154).

Whereas some scholars critique early American privacy discourse for obscuring the interconnections between public and private realms, Adams takes this critique one step further and argues that privacy is established only through publicity. As she asserts in her introduction, "the badge of inalienable private selfhood is only ever acquired through strategies of self-display and public circulation" (8). The book, therefore, reveals that privacy has no fixed meaning; rather, it is always articulated as an essential component of civic society that is constantly embattled and receding. The most significant [End Page 145] insights of Owning Up, then, emerge in its detailed examinations of how public discourses—and literary texts in particular—actually produce privacy. An analysis of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, for example, reveals how Margaret Fuller established an idealized form of private relations, which celebrated the sameness of the two partners in a marriage relationship, in opposition to the destructive forces of the market economy. The genre of life writing is of particular interest to Adams because it underscores how public texts substantiate private identity. In other words, a woman's life writing enables the subject to lay claim to inviolable selfhood precisely by exposing her life to public view. In this sense, life writing both markets and thematizes privacy, celebrating the privileges of privacy while also confronting its constructed nature. Over the course of its five chapters, Owning Up demonstrates "how early American women writers manipulated rhetorics of exposure and invasion to create privacy meanings for their own use" (8).

This volume's focus on women writers does not, however, indicate a privileging of gender over race. By analyzing various representations of Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Keckley, Adams underscores the many ways in which the market economy that produced the rhetorics of privacy relied on black bodies and their labor. In her discussions of Stowe, she contributes to the growing body of criticism on Dred, asserting that it rejects the cross-racial sympathy of Uncle Tom's Cabin and instead emphasizes racial difference in order to propose models that can contain black privation and thereby sustain white privacy. Stowe's beliefs reflect nineteenth-century privacy discourse more broadly in that Dred "pursues a fantasy of not being owned that is driven by fear of being owned" (11). Through such insights, Adams aligns herself with other scholars who have worked to dismantle the separate spheres paradigm by demonstrating that discussions of privacy are always inextricably connected to arguments about national belonging.

Rather than produce another study of how male writers project their anxieties about US culture onto female characters, this study emphasizes women writers' understandings of the complexities associated with private identity. It is clear, though, that Adams's concern is with how texts shape understandings of privacy. In other words, she focuses on representations of privacy instead of biographical anecdotes about how women writers reckoned with privacy issues in their everyday lives. This approach certainly is not a shortcoming of the study, but it explains why...

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