Panic Fiction: Women and Antebellum Economic Crisis

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Cathy N. Davidson’s Revolution and the Word and Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs are foundational texts that demonstrate the engagement of sentimental and domestic fiction in political discourse, showing how both genres often embraced very specific political viewpoints and attempted to influence American readers to think, feel, and act according to those viewpoints. Other examples of critics who have argued for a “politics of sympathy” in sentimental novels are Shirley Samuels, Julia A. Stern, Elizabeth Barnes, and Michelle Burnham. Nina Baym’s groundbreaking study Woman’s Fiction was among the first to take the domestic novel seriously, finding it to promote women’s independence within the fulfillment of domestic duty. Extending Baym’s analysis, critics such as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Joanne Dobson, and Susan K. Harris have either emphasized the positive aspects of the female domestic culture portrayed in nineteenth-century women’s fiction or located the value of such novels in their subversive subtexts, resisting patriarchal authority beneath the surface. Looking more specifically at the political and cultural discourse of women’s fiction, Barbara Bardes and Suzanne Gossett have argued that a number of nineteenthcentury female authors used their fiction to take positions on issues such as individual rights versus community order, the legitimacy of women’s public speaking, and women’s property rights, as well as to argue overall for a greater political role for American women. Other examples of work on domestic writing include Lora Romero, Nicole Tonkovich, Amy Kaplan, and Laurie Ousley. 2. The term “panic fiction” has also been used by critics such as David Zimmerman and Maria Carla Sanchez, who demonstrate that narratives about economic panic have been produced by both men and women, in multiple time periods. Although I attempt to specify “female-authored” and “antebellum” as often as possible, sometimes for the sake of simplicity, I simply use “panic fiction” with the qualifying terms implicit in my usage. Also, while the word “panic” evokes multiple connotations, including that of a psychological or emotional state, I am using the term primarily in its economic sense—descriptive 220 Notes to Pages 3–11 of a particular economic phenomenon in which commodities lose value rapidly and individual and commercial failures are widespread. “Panic” was used virtually interchangeably in panic texts with terms such as “crisis,” “pressures,” and “distress.” 3. Michael Warner has argued that the “public sphere”—Jurgen Habermas’s concept of an arena in which citizens come together freely to confer on matters of public interest , to exchange informed opinions, and to shape public policy based on conceptions of the common good—was not only constituted by face-to-face debate between members of the public body but also by print culture. In fact, Warner contends that the simultaneous development of a large reading population and independent forms of print—newspapers, broadsides, magazines, essays, and fiction—created “new opportunities for individuals to make public use of their reason” (x–xi). Although Warner argues that even this print embodiment of the public sphere was implicitly a white male domain—and that the very existence of such public discourse in print depended on such an identification—the private and often anonymous nature of writing and publication made it possible for some educated women to express views on public matters in print in a way that they could not have done in a public meeting. Publishing their political, social, or economic views in the form of novels or stories allowed female authors to shape public opinion without violating implicit—and sometimes explicit—bans on women’s public participation. See also Ryan, Women in Public and Civic Wars, Burgett, and Isenberg. 4. Richard H. Brodhead places the formation of a domestic culture of letters in the 1830s and 1840s, noting that during those decades the number of novels published in the United States increased tenfold, while popular periodicals first began to flourish. This same period saw a rapid increase in the number of newspapers. 5. New York Herald, November 7, 1835; May 8, 1837; May 9, 1837. Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, November 2, 1836; April 7, 1837. New Orleans Picayune, April 11, 1837. Democratic Free Press (Detroit), October 26, 1836; April 28, 1837. 6. Notable exceptions to this include McGrane, Van Vleck, and Sobel. More recent studies include Calomiris and Schweikart, Rousseau, Sandage, and Lepler. 7. See, for instance, Male, Vernon, Michaels, and Godden. Walter F. Taylor does treat a number of female authors but still places the origins of economic fiction...