Modernizing Solitude: The Networked Individual in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Yoshiaki Furui (review)

In Modernizing Solitude, Yoshiaki Furui examines the development of what he terms the paradox of a "networked solitude" (12) found in writings by Thoreau, Jacobs, Melville, Dickinson, and James, based on mid-nineteenth-century improvements in communications that came with the explosive growth of the telegraph, the railroad, and the postal system. Centering his discussion on Walden, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "John Marr," Dickinson's poetry, and In the Cage, Furui unites the study of literary solitude with the communications revolution that transformed the US during the era when its national literature came of age.

In his paradoxical idea of a networked solitude in nineteenth-century American literature, Furui develops a critical paradigm that yields mixed results, with some of his arguments seeming too self-evident and others providing useful grounds for further exploration. Within this varied range, his chapter on Melville is perhaps the most rewarding and his chapter on Jacobs the least. Thus, following a chapter that historicizes the nineteenth-century communications revolution, Furui examines Walden as an example of "Impure Solitude" (chapter 1) because of the porous nature of Thoreau's hermit-like existence at Walden Pond: his constant interaction with, and commentary on, the surrounding community and world. In a chapter on Harriet Jacobs's antislavery memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Furui examines the importance of letters and newspapers to Jacobs's persona of Linda Brent during her seven-year immurement in her cramped loft while hiding from her devious and lustful master. Turning to Melville, Furui relates "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and the late poetry of John Marr and Other Sailors to the motif of the "dead letter" that emerged with the creation of the Dead Letter Office as an integral part of the expanding postal system. In the chapter on Dickinson, Furui revisits the paradox of Dickinson's self-enclosure in her Amherst bedroom and the plethora of letters she wrote to friends and family members, noting the poet's enjoyment of the process, not the state, of connection with others. Finally, Furui examines the extensive literature that emerged in the later nineteenth century in response to the pervasive presence of the telegraph, which was seen as a utopian means to create human connectivity. Yet the literature that developed from this phenomenon, typified by James's novella In the Cage, portrayed the new communication technology as creating a virtual prison, not a liberating connection with others, an ironic result that users of contemporary social media can well appreciate.

Here I will focus on Furui's chapter on "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and the late collection John Marr and Other Sailors. In his discussion of "Bartleby," Furui examines the story in light of the narrator's final reference to a vague report that Bartleby worked in the Washington, DC, Dead Letter Office previous to his employment on Wall Street with the narrator. Using the story's relation to the development of US postal services during the nineteenth century, Furui sheds new light on the historical and symbolic implications of dead letters and the Dead Letter Office to the meaning of the story. He argues that Bartleby's solitude is "a willful resistance to the communications revolution" but that he is "less alienated from than inescapably implicated in the commercial circulation enabled by an emerging media environment" (70). He begins his analysis by examining the recurrent motif of the breakdown in epistolary communication as figured in Melville's writing in the 1850s, when his own career was becoming something of a dead letter. Furui similarly points out the imagery of interrupted epistolary communication in Moby-Dick, in the Agatha letters written to Hawthorne, and in the sketches in The Encantadas.

A highlight of this chapter is its overview of the history of the national post office and its description of the Dead Letter Office, established in the nation's capital in 1825. We learn...