Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom (review)

Philadelphia Stories is a showcase of textual analysis, firmly set in time and place and commanding the attention of historians of the Civil War. It is an invitation to interdisciplinary conversation that should not be declined, given how it deepens our understanding of race in American history as well as literature. Samuel Otter conducts literary analysis with stunning finesse and at the same time acknowledges "the need to understand the historical situation of … literary achievement" (4). Neither historicism nor formalism, Otter avers, should dominate the study of racial thought in antebellum America. Furthermore, Philadelphia Stories sets a path for collaboration between our disciplines upon methodological grounds we share, the conceptual frame of place and space as exemplified by the antebellum American city.

The consummate effect of Philadelphia Stories is to expose the prodigious, wrenching, multivoiced, and high-stakes debate about race that went on north of slavery and before the Civil War. Otter exposes the most patently racist literary fare in the City of Brotherly Love and reports the bold rebuttals issued by the city's free black leaders, who "seize[d] the tenuous opportunities of emancipation, and fiercely negotiated, at the level of the word" (38). Otter squeezes multiple complex meanings out of graphic images as well. He scrutinizes Edward Clay's racist cartoons (which routinely illustrate history books) and places them in a wider satirical tradition that targeted nearly every category of person who walked Philadelphia streets. Otter goes on to pair these images with less well known visual portraits, Charles Willson Peale's popular silhouettes, which minimize racial difference.

Otter's explications of documents like these illuminate issues that have long consumed Civil War historians. His investigations of African American domesticity, moral reform, and consumerism amplify the work of Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., and Patrick Rael (but Otter disputes the latter's gentle indictment of African writers for masculinist and bourgeois prejudice). Philadelphia Stories also lends support to the cultural historian's recognition of the pliability and ambiguity of identity in antebellum America. Picaresque writing like that of Hugh Henry Brackenridge reveled in shifting and reversing identities, not just from black to white but from animal to human, and sometimes introduced these ambiguities into debates about civil rights and the franchise. These challenges to racial certitude were mounted in a specific time and place, in a northern city and especially during the 1840s, when both social geography and the setting of the novel were just beginning to sort class, race, and ethnicity into different districts and along different streets.

Otter's exemplary method of interrogating documents is literary history in the best sense. Most of his stories lead to other texts, defer to other critics, and culminate in aesthetic judgments. Otter closes his text with a brilliant exegesis of Melville's novella of aborted slave mutiny, Benito Cereno. He presses his interpretation to the maximum point of African American rebellion, dwelling on the scene in which the mutinous slave pierces the throat of the white ship captain: "just then the razor drew blood, spots of which stained the creamy lather under the throat" (272). Otter refrains, however, from asserting a single reading of this or other texts. He seems to endorse Melville's preferred posture of critical distance: "Melville works hard not to ensure a 'correct' reading" (270). Otter also calls in the aesthetic heavy weapon, Henry James, to assert that "history is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of what 'happens' but the much finer complexity of what we read into it and think of in connection with it" (165).

At this juncture, this historian is moved to acknowledge compatible and useful differences between our disciplines. Otter's literary argument progresses by way of textual association, moving from one document to another based on the repetition of words and images. Less constrained by considerations of proximity in time or actual relationships, he can move agilely from antebellum Philadelphia to Dutch still...