Increasing the Profitability of "Racial Exchange": Response to Freedman

At the beginning of his provocative essay on The Searchers (1956), Jonathan Freedman makes a confession. For the past five years, he admits, he has been obsessed by one question: "[W]hat happens to literary and cultural studies in general, and the study of American literature in particular, when we factor in that different form of difference we know as Jewish difference?" I must admit that I share a similar interest. For the past few years, I have been exploring the appropriation of Jewish stories and figures in the rhetoric of American women, particularly abolitionists, attempting to justify their right to speak in public.

Putting aside the prospect of "Jewish difference" for a moment, I wish to situate Freedman's revisioning of economics as "the complex tangle of experiences that is life in an advanced capitalist economy" among existing work. Freedman's critical perspective, it seems to me, shares a kinship with the writings of Marxist, labor, and other social historians, such as Thomas Dublin, Heidi Hartman, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who have explored the effects of capitalism on gender identity.¹ I detect an especially strong though unacknowledged relationship with Jeanne Boydston's study of housework and the ideology of labor in the early republic, which teases out the effects of industrialization on the ways in which society and women themselves perceived their value not just in the marketplace, but in the family and the world in general.² Likewise, Anne Lewis Osler has explored how during the 1820s and 1830s women employed the sentimental novel to enter debate over competing economic systems by constructing characters who vividly represent the virtues and evils of free labor and slave labor.³

While these analyses are concerned with the interaction of economics and gender, they do not account for, nor are they particularly interested in, what Freedman calls "Jewish difference." By seriously engaging the economic stereotype of the Jew in order to discern its function in the narrative of The Searchers, Freedman builds on William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin's and Richard White's observations about frontier trade to give us the powerful concept of "racial exchange." Focusing on the connections between the economic and racial imaginaries will, I believe, yield new and insightful readings of a multitude of discourses.

What comes to my mind is Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Considering this work from the point of view of economic experience, we realize that the initial conflict of the novel, the financial necessity of selling Uncle Tom and Harry despite the fact that they are loved by the Shelbys, represents the realities of living under a plantation economy. Through the Shelbys, Stowe demonstrates that even good people who call themselves Christians are harmed emotionally and morally by the economic system of slave labor. We also encounter Mr. Haley, whom, we are told on the very first page of the novel, "was much over-dressed, in a gaudy vest of many colors, a blue neckerchief, . . . arranged with a flaunting tie, quite in keeping with the general air of the man. His hands, large and coarse, were plentifully bedecked with rings; and he wore a heavy gold watch-chain, with a bundle of seals of portentous size, and a great variety of colors attached to it--which, in the ardor of conversation, he was in the habit of flourishing and jingling with evident satisfaction" (1).⁴ Stowe contrasts starkly the gold-loving, verbally demonstrative, and greedy Haley to the refined Christian gentleman, Mr. Shelby.

As the novel progresses, Haley becomes increasingly loathsome, evoking from other characters in the novel as well as the reader emotions of disgust and hatred. Stowe imbues Haley with Jewish qualities to provoke in her readers a visceral reaction of disgust for the slave trader, a man who reduces human beings into commodities for exchange, a man who embodies the evil, unchristian, and villainous nature of slavery. Haley not only...