The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

When notoriety strikes, particularly when accompanied by suffering, otherwise unknown Americans, acting on time-honored tradition, rush their stories into print before the opportunity for fame has passed. Monica Lewinsky’s first lawyer predicted she would “have no choice but to . . . sell her story in order to pay off her legal bills.” And so she has. Although contemporary examples proliferate (such as the hasty autobiographies of the numerous participants in O. J. Simpson’s trial—“not one of whom could claim, by profession, skill, accomplishment, or training, to be a writer,” says Ann Fabian), they have a long history of antecedents. Virtually all, even the formulaic ghost-written or totally fictional works, profess to be “the unvarnished truth.”

The Unvarnished Truth focuses on a vast but little known body of nineteenth-century personal narratives of several outlaw or outcast groups, largely poor and often illiterate, intended for a white middle-class audience. Fabian devotes a chapter each to beggars (“the story of the nation,” understood through tales of the cooper, the minister, and the sailor), convicts (“the story of sin and evil”), slaves, and prisoners of war, which together present mirror-image accounts of the story of freedom. The brief epilogue focuses on early twentieth-century accounts, largely fictional stories of suffering, by “Lovers, Farm Wives, and Tramps,” many told in Bernarr Mcfadden’s True Story magazine.

Who owns one’s life story? Who has the right to tell it, shape it, sell it, and make a profit from it? What responses do readers bring to these tales, which are often lurid accounts of chicanery, debauchery, flight and pursuit, or captivity and excoriating physical punishment? How do such anticipated readings influence the telling, packaging, and selling of narratives by people unknown to the readers? Fabian brings a social historian’s analysis to bear on questions that resonate with implications of race, class, gender, ethical, and historical considerations. For instance, by the 1830s (after centuries of clerical exhortation), it was customary for people sentenced to die to write and publish confessions of crime, punishment, and repentance. Fabian shows that “the results were curious documents, designed sometimes to serve the interests of confessing criminals as well as the interests of the state and its agents, jailers, and executioners” (54). “Those on the brink of death were presumed honest,” and their accounts trustworthy. In stark contrast were the narratives of escaped slaves, people “without social, cultural, or even legal standing.” Although their only economic asset might be their “ability to tell a tale” and sell it for survival, slaves were often “presumed dishonest,” even by “sympathetic abolitionists,” and their stories were questioned, thereby putting their lives in double jeopardy. The Unvarnished Truth illuminates American culture, past and contemporary, through incisive examination of a vast body of literature by an American underclass whose stories continue to bear witness.