In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), the narrator Coverdale marks the beginning of a Transcendentalist experiment with a simple tea ceremony. Although the experimenters aim for a classless society, Coverdale cannot elude the material markers of class even at the outset: in a show of “equal brotherhood and sisterhood,” the group that considers itself “people of superior cultivations and refinement” gathers at the rustic dinner table with the hosts, “unpolished farmers” (23). Coverdale critiques the sincerity of Blithedale’s expressed goals when he boasts that they “saw fit to drink [their] tea out of earthen cups to-night, and in earthen company” only because they are secure in the knowledge that “it was at [their] option to use pictured porcelain and handle silver forks again, tomorrow” (23). Although the narrator recognizes the hypocrisy involved, he cannot escape the social distinctions marked by the simple dishes used. His direct connection between the “earthen” company and its “earthen” cups, as well as their contrast to the refined diners accustomed to “pictured porcelain” encapsulates an antebellum use of material goods that identified and created social identities. By the time Hawthorne wrote The Blithedale Romance in 1852, an evolution in dishware had developed to encourage the connections made by Coverdale—a link between class and race and the things one used. In the middle of the eighteenth century, American colonists generally ate from buff-colored “earthen” ceramics—coarse earthenwares or stonewares that could be manufactured locally. More refined dishes could be obtained only as imports. As European potters attempted to imitate the refined porcelain of China, dishes became whiter by degrees. After the 1750s, yellowware became available, which was later replaced by creamware. By the 1790s, British manufacturers were circulating creamware worldwide. By the end of the century, pearlware replaced creamware; whiteware was developed between 1820 and 1830 (Majewski and O’Brien 22). The closest English approach to porcelain was achieved in 1850 with white ironstone dishes; and imported Chinese porcelain with a blue willow design remained the most expensive and “cultivated” of ceramics at the time The Blithedale Romance was published. The coarser, darker ceramics remained in circulation, but mainly for working or storage vessels, or for the lower classes. Silas Foster, the Blithedale farmer, maintains an “earthen” identity clearly belonging to a lower class than the Transcendentalist characters because his dishes belong to an outdated style and buff color that, along with his “sun-burnt” complexion, visually segregate him from his guests (36).
Frederick Douglass contributes to the racial conversation of dining ware in Narrative of the Life of a Slave (1845): at his childhood plantation, the slave children eat from a “large wooden tray or trough,” with oyster shells or “pieces of shingle” or their bare hands for silverware, “like so many pigs” (72). In Douglass’s description, the difference between the pictured porcelain handled by gentlemen and the wooden trough used by slave children establishes the latter as nearly another species. Slaves in general were issued dark, undecorated earthenware dishes in the early nineteenth century.1 As wealthy consumers purchased whiter and whiter ceramics, lower-class diners could afford only outdated creamware and yellowware, and slaves ate from coarse, dark earthenware or wooden trenchers. Douglass and Hawthorne record, in these examples, the way race and class could be read from simple eating vessels—how, in fact, these social messages could not be avoided. And the dishes themselves painted their users—black slaves used wooden or dark ceramic dishes, earthen laborers used earthen cups, sallow lower-class factory workers used yellowware, and the truly “white” consumers used white porcelain.
Archaeologist James Deetz notes a “whitening of America” occurring in the material record that extends far beyond just the dishes used, however. Beginning at the time of the American Revolution and increasing until the Civil War, American consumers began preferring whiter, more finished products over dark-colored natural goods.2 Deetz notes the emerging popularity of whiteness in ceramics, house paint, and gravestones beginning in the late eighteenth century; the early decades of the nineteenth century show this trend spreading to landscaping, interior design, women’s clothing, and literary heroines as well. From the beginning of the trend in the late eighteenth century, these “whitening” things also became more specialized, segmented, refined, and standardized as manufacturing technology mastered mass-production. As dishes became whiter, dish sets included more specific types and more exacting etiquette; houses began to be whitewashed and divided into more private, use-specific rooms with mathematically measured architecture;3 and gravestones shifted from rough-hewn slates and dark materials to smoothened, white marble with engraved angels and urns (Deetz, “Material Culture” 223).
By contrast, slave housing was commonly rough log cabins or unspecialized sheds. The dishes issued to slaves were mostly handed-down pieces from the masters’ sets or coarse earthenware vessels, or possibly wooden or tin dishes as described by Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. The paths set on plantations may have been racially informed also—for example, Douglass’s birthplace and the historical homestead Morven had white paths leading to the mansions’ front doors and dark paths in the back, for slave use. While the upper classes ordered white marble tombstones, slaves were often buried without markers, or perhaps with temporary wooden ones. In the North, white houses found contrast against the increasingly segregated lower classes that came to live and labor in the less visible spaces—alleys, basements, the backs of yards. White goods contributed to the upper and middle classes’ attempt to deny its dependence on labor, to expel the “blackness” of slavery and servitude and impose an imaginary segregation even were integration was absolute.
The white things of the early nineteenth century signified more than racial concerns—including the traditional understandings of moral purity, as well as refinement and democracy, cleanliness, femininity, and order. Market trends with white products were also a response to European fashion and the availability of building materials. Henry Glassie suggests that the architectural choices made in the eighteenth and nineteenth century followed a discernible pattern and pointed to a cultural shift from natural to artificial after about 1760 (Folk Housing 160–161). This change, he argues, is a response to social crises, a show of democracy and control (156). Deetz finds these choices made also in ceramics, cuts of meat, and gravestone engravings which can be dated to the turn of the nineteenth century—signaling, also, a move towards artificial and cultural over natural (“Material Culture”). But the coincidence of popularity for white things in so many realms of everyday life, as well as the even more emphatic preference seen in the South generally and plantations specifically, suggests that blackness and slavery informed these choices and even determined the categories from which choices might be made. The existence of slavery, which established a permanent black lower class, demanded that even when a New England housewife far separated from slavery sought to appear upper class, she was fleeing the blackness of this bottom rung. As the nineteenth century wore on, fictional representations of slavery reached northerners through minstrel plays as well as slave stories, and the image of the black slave as carefree, undisciplined, dirty, and sexualized required a flight from these associations as well. The choices that in the eighteenth century may have been towards democracy and control over nature became in the nineteenth century—with the increase in slave populations and dependence on slave labor—a choice towards civilization compared to the savage slave, a unified democracy of white people, and control over nature as well as those who labored in it. White things radiated refinement, order, discipline: but in doing so, they also radiated race.
While the proliferation of elite items—porcelain, classical architecture, and imported gravestones—began as an attempt by the upper class to mark its distinction, mass-production made such goods more available to an aspiring middle class. Advertisements for white luxury goods, whether printed on the pages of Godey’s Lady’s Book or displayed on the dinner tables or in the china cabinets of the elite, also helped to disseminate the trend. The advent of professional architecture spawned numerous guidebooks for home and landscape design; guidebooks on manners and managing a home were popular as “gift books” in the early nineteenth century. For those without access to the elite dining room, novels described ideal domestic scenes and behaviors that included the details of white china, white decor, and white-clad women—or criticized their absence. As increasing imitation among the lower classes called for constant refinement of upper-class definitions, the image created by material goods drew closer and closer to that of the upper-class white woman. Decorations and trim on white houses and ceramics came to mirror female clothing fashions, and the cemetery became a feminized space of flowers, angels, and meditation. As the main consumers of the family, upper- and middle-class white women were responsible for purchasing these white goods. They were responsible for teaching the etiquette that white dishes enforced, and they bore the burden of the ideal purity and spirituality of fiction’s white heroines.
The white things that flooded households and landscapes in the nineteenth century created an essentially conservative message, telling consumers that the exploitation and miscegenation in slavery were ignorable; that the wage slavery of emerging industrialism was justifiable; that the stricter delineation of gender roles channeled a “greater” power to disfranchised women; and that all of these were mitigated by the sanctified, otherworldly sphere of the home. As the most expensive available, the whitest items—white paint, marble, and porcelain—distinguished the wealthy. These ceramics became common in sets in the late eighteenth century; these sets increased in specialization, elaborateness, and number of vessels throughout the nineteenth century. As pieces of ever-expanding collections, the many types of salad plates, bread plates, and dessert plates demanded training in etiquette which marked the “civilized” from the masses, but which also trained imitative lower classes in the type of standardized detail work needed in the factory. In favoring these goods, consumers built a definition of “whiteness” that naturalized its pairing with wealth, discipline, and purity, ultimately reserving these qualities for the racially “white” only.
The significance of these white things—both the cultural work they might do and the ways people from varying social positions responded to their messages—can best be examined when placed in a four-dimensional setting. Material culture studies treat the thing in its social and historical context, often identifying popular conceptions and uses of a thing. Historical archaeology finds the thing as a concrete, three-dimensional object and places it in its geographical and functional context: archaeology can identify who uses things, where they use them, and with what frequency. Literature invests the “thing” with an action context, depicting the thing as it exists in time: in the literature of the early nineteenth century, the white thing is used, discussed, interpreted, discarded. My approach draws from the contributions of each of these, as I design the thing to be a physical entity through archaeology, with a traceable history and future, as well as an individual agent in literature, guided by its cultural biography but not determined by it. As I attempt to bridge the disciplines, I project from the archaeological and historical findings a sort of “life story” for the white “thing,” exploring its role as commodity and social signifier. As I move to the white thing’s appearance in literature, I examine the extent to which the story shows these cultural meanings at work. Its “life” in that story, whereby it becomes an individual agent, helps reveal the author’s manipulations and possible uses for it. With an awareness of the cultural work being done, we can distinguish the work of this particular thing from that of others of its kind.
My contextualization of the white thing draws upon the thoughts and labor of historical archaeologists beginning with Deetz, but extending throughout the specialties with southern and northern gravestones, ceramics, architecture and folk housing, landscape archaeology, and more ideological post-processual work. In the field of material culture studies, I begin with the observations of Robyn Wiegman and Karen Halttunen, who establish in their work an early nineteenth-century American culture that turned to visual, commodified clues to explain the conflict between newly emerging social distinctions. In American Anatomies (1996), Robyn Wiegman argues that one of the products of the Enlightenment was a dependence on visual traits in structuring scientific categories. Appearance as a determining factor in identity came from science’s emphasis of empirical impressions. In her argument, color became “the primary organizing principle” for distinguishing groups of people by the late seventeenth century, initiating an eventual formation of “black” as a race. “[M]aking the African ‘black,’ ” she contends, “reduces the racial meanings attached to flesh to a binary structure of vision” (24, 4). Thus race, indicated first by black or white skin, established a social division that had not before existed.
But other divisions were also arising to be designated. The visual tendencies of empiricism colluded with a preference for binaries that characterizes a society in crisis, and the flood of manufactured goods suddenly available became vehicles for marking these divisions. Studying the clothing fashions of Godey’s Lady’s Book in the nineteenth century, Karen Halttunen begins with the claim that in “early industrial America … preindustrial methods of coding the urban stranger were breaking down before modern methods could replace them” (42). A visible display took the place of detailed biographical knowledge of a person. In Halttunen’s argument, clothes became a way of asserting class and gender distinctions, providing fine gradations in femininity, sentiment, and wealth—and causing anxiety about the possibilities of misrepresentation and deceit. Other visual markers also provided this bulwark—house fronts and household architecture, furniture, ceremonial dining and teas—and the use of these things, bound by strict rules, helped to filter out imposters who lacked the proper social training. As goods became more refined through new manufacturing techniques, their consumption became an ideological claim: first, for the new over the old, progressive over traditional. But the appearance and association of these new products suggested, even further, an embrace of new ways of viewing social categories—masculine and feminine, upper and lower class, white and black.
The power of white things relied upon more than their simple visual presentation, however: these dishes, houses, and gravestones were things—solid objects to be put to functional use, to be exchanged and valued, to be cared for, repaired, saved, and stored. The concrete presence of a thing does not simply resonate meaning; it acts upon a body. As Stanley Johannesen explains, the form and mechanics of a chest of drawers introduces “an entirely novel repertory of thought and action in putting things away and retrieving them again: the stooping, pulling, shutting; the employment of elbow, backside, knee, belly, forehead, foot; the bracing, balancing, tugging, slamming: all unknown to the medieval householder in this variety” (218). The body introduced to a chest of drawers is, in effect, a different body from the one using hooks or shelves; and the mind is at least as changed, forced to organize articles into small square categories, to decide upon the propriety of hidden-ness, if clothes, dishes, or junk belong in the drawers, to subdivide by drawer, and even further to fold, compress, and display within. In the examples from Hawthorne and Douglass, the literary works use material things to demonstrate both how social categories are formed and reinforced and how their use influences both user and audience. Douglass defines the brutality of slave treatment through the wooden trough the children eat from, but also by the way they eat from it—“He that ate fastest got most; he that was strongest secured the best place” (Narrative 72). Hawthorne’s “brawny” farmer uses earthenware dishes, but he also behaves “less like a civilized Christian than the worst kind of ogre” when he “pour[s] out his own tea, and gulp[s] it down,” when he uses the same knife for buttering toast as for slicing ham, and when he drinks directly from the water pitcher (Blithedale 30).
When I examine the white thing in both literature and archaeology, I expand upon the textual and social approaches by treating it as a subject, an inanimate personality, rather than an object. I respond to it as a material entity first, a solid object that will be used until it is finally discarded and unearthed by an archaeologist or preserved in a museum. This material use places demands on the body of its user, whether consumer, author, or reader; it exists textually for the reader’s mind and physically in the reader’s cabinets. The biography of the thing—the social history—describes where it comes from, who made it, and how it was obtained. In an industrial society, however, the makers of manufactured products and their designs are the least important aspect of the thing’s life. The thing as commodity—its cost, scarcity, and usefulness—only activates its social life.4 Afterwards, the use of the thing defines its social life or its identifying personality: how it is used, and how it in turn acts upon the user, visually and anatomically.
A precise approach to the thing as the object of material culture studies has been debated since the field’s early days. Anne Yentsch and Mary Beaudry review its progress in archaeological scholarship: in the 1990s, Ian Hodder suggested viewing the thing as a “text,” to be read as sign or symbol. In 1995 Gottdeiner treated things as signs, and their use as “a staged performance” (Yentsch and Beaudry 233). Glassie suggests more specificity: things should not be viewed as mere texts, but as “[P]oetry, explosive with vague profundity” (“Studying Material Culture” 255). His analogy to poetry works on one level because even a simple plate cannot be “read” and universally understood: its design, form, and message may be studied, internalized, misinterpreted, or recontextualized. At the same time, any text is almost pure symbol. It exists in the perpetual present tense, and only in perception. Arjun Appadurai’s study seeks to liberate this dependent existence, assigning to things a “social life” and an agency. The essays in The Social Life of Things address “those commodities whose consumption is most intricately tied up with critical social messages [and which] are likely to be least responsive to crude shifts in supply or price but most responsive to political manipulation at the societal level” (33). Such long-lived commodities must be basic to everyday life, but the shifts as well as the political manipulation can be revealing. The life span of the “whitening” trend ranges from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War and beyond, with variations in design and degree but also a steady adherence to increased specialization and racial contrast. These things are exploited by literature, political propaganda, advertisements, and periodicals as salient social markers.
But the life history of a thing is only part of its story, and several material culture scholars have attempted to bridge the gaps between its past and its future, or its textual and its material significance, or its passive, deposited existence and its active “life” in everyday use. In historical archaeology, this gap is addressed as the tension between processual and post-processual approaches. The former treats a single site such as a plantation with intensive collection of data and an adherence to scientific method (Renfrew). The post-processual approach, on the other hand, can gather select data from many sites to make an argument about symbolic significance that is more culturally widespread. It takes logical liberties with a site defined not by a provenience, a yardstick, and straight sidewalls, but by an idea: for example, any middle-class dining room table. This leap requires an imaginative bridge, however, variously voiced as “an ethnographic interrogation of documents to construct ‘action contexts’ “(Yentsch and Beaudry, “Material Culture” 225); as a concern for “ ‘specifically existing moments’ ” and “real people” (Meskell 19); or as an attempt to imagine the artifact in a “lost physical context which is always no more than a fiction of [the scholar’s] own wit” and is “usually inappropriately” shaped “out of our own culture” (Glassie, “Studying” 257, 256).
Reconciliation of this tension is best achieved, argues Henry Glassie, when the artifact is “[e]nvisioned as a composition, a set of parts, and as a thing in context, a part of sets …. The next step is to loop composition and context into a single reciprocal system” (Glassie, “Studying” 259). This describes the thing’s nexus of associations as part of an assemblage, the conception of which distinguishes my use of material culture from other studies. Historical archaeology makes an important contribution to material culture studies, especially as reflected in the literary record, because it studies not individual objects or products, nor specific historical events, but rather an assemblage—a category of things shaped by appearance, use, or location.5 The white thing as investigated by archaeology is not, then, merely representative, but part of a collection that expands into other dining rooms, is witnessed by other classes of people, and must be negotiated into a culturally reliable signifier. The whiteness of the whale in Moby Dick can symbolize an abstracted whiteness which has undulated through infinite meanings throughout the decades,6 but Moby Dick had also a physical presence in readers’ homes, as Melville reminds us: the whale oil was used for lamps, the bones were used in corsets and skirt hoops.7
A literary text can invest the white thing with such an imaginary “action context,” one deliberately developed by a contemporary author who is imbedded in the thing’s own culture. The thing gains a social life that acts within the fictional and ideological confines of the author’s creation, but also across the terrain of many literary works. I have treated in this study many literary texts with a brief, focused attention, and even more only glancingly, but these texts are exemplary rather than exhaustive. White things pervaded antebellum everyday life and also pervaded fictional settings—although the one does not guarantee the other. The recent works linking material culture studies with literature in the nineteenth century offer finely focused bridges from one to the other: the continuing project of this aspect of material culture, I would argue, is the creation of as many bridges and entrées as possible, building truly interdisciplinary understandings, with the concrete concept of the “thing” as the bridge. Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff, with their collection in The Social Life of Things (1986), view the thing as a commodity and place it in a historical context as capable of making social change. Bill Brown provides a most clearly elaborated relationship that is, in fact, a mutually beneficial exchange between historical things and literature. In it, literature can reveal what has actually happened in history, and history can “recuperate” the meaning of a given thing in a literary passage.8 Lori Merish’s Sentimental Materialism (2000) and Gillian Brown’s Domestic Individualism (1990) successfully integrate the material object and the literary text in order to reveal social constructs, investigating theoretically what I attempt to demonstrate archaeologically. Merish’s Sentimental Materialism begins with a philosophical history in order to uncover a material basis to the gendered and racial constructions presented in literature. In Domestic Individualism, Brown investigates the workings of gender among antebellum literary texts and material things such as house design and fashion. Having built theoretical bridges themselves, these scholars leave blueprints rather than paths—different starting points require new methodologies. My work moves from the physical to the fictional, weighing ideals and realities in the thing’s representation. In this way, my study is able to integrate the general and the particular when considering social phenomena, especially the construction of whiteness. The thing as a product to be consumed and the thing as an invention of the author both undergo investigation; with this approach, the literary text cannot remain a historical, nor can the product remain unspeaking and anonymous.
Things were the building blocks of antebellum culture, and white things helped to build the binary definitions that supported notions of class, gender, and race.9 They accomplished this work mainly through their color and their relationship to their users. In the visual economy of emergent industrialism, the consumers’ relationship to their things was demonstrated daily in ritualized performances, even within their own households. From a mainstream, middle-class white perspective, from the archaeological record and from literary examples, only those who had fashionable white goods could have been variously styled as racially “white”—because white goods were the popular elite products and markers of upper- or middle-class refinement and because mainly the properly respectable, middle-class, or sentimental characters were allowed a fictive white skin. These standards left some Caucasians as nonwhite, and the records afford them buff-colored, yellow, and red dishes, unpainted houses, and sallow, red, or swarthy complexions. White-skinned slaves—mulattos, quadroons, octoroons—could also in this way be deemed “black,” since “race” was based on material goods as well as skin color. The racial caveat, of course, was that one white thing remain that could not be attained by African Americans or other racial minorities—white skin.10 Arguments about white slavery or wage slavery assigned the slave’s legalized lack of upward mobility to working-class whites, and the lost potential was regarded as a darker evil than mere poverty—although most laborers would reject the label as applied to themselves.
The thing, or brute, appears not to participate in the material economy at all, neither possessing nor desiring, nor able to acquire things. In antebellum America, the term “thing” virtually vibrated with tension as it became a battleground for both pro-slavery and abolitionist arguments. Both sides generally agreed that a person should not be owned; therefore, the definition of “thing” and a slave’s status in relation to it became the site on which slavery’s rationalizations were contested. James Fenimore Cooper appends a footnote to this effect in Notions of the Americans, advising that slavery and politics do not mix because “the slaves have no more to do with the government than inanimate objects” (qtd. in Doolen 153). The single distinction between a slave and a brute—a thing to be owned with no agency of its own—is the desire to participate in the material economy. Therefore, pro-slavery writing attempted to portray slaves as content and carefree, erasing their humanizing ambition.
Outside of pro-slavery rhetoric, slaves could desire freedom or literacy or material comforts beyond what was given them, and this desire alone made them active participants in the system. This, in addition, helped to justify the rest of the system: those who did not “desire” in the American way insulted it; on the other hand, slaves might embody naked desire, unfettered by attainment or potential. Thus, when Frederick Douglass claims in the pivotal statement of his Narrative, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man,” he posits a rise of several levels. He has been brutalized by the slave driver Covey until he passes his Sundays in a “beast-like stupor” and is therefore less than a slave.11 When he begins to desire freedom again, he regains his personhood; but when he fights Covey, he begins to see that he might be able to attain his freedom, and with this potential arises “a sense of [his] own manhood” (113). Manhood—humanity with the addition of “masculinity”—was a participation in the material economy that included the ability to have, to desire, and to obtain.12
My definition of “feminine” as materially built depends upon two claims: that femininity was only afforded to middle- and upper-class white women, who depended upon something other than their own marketplace labor for their livelihoods, and that the “feminine” must pretend not to desire this material comfort, only maintaining it for the sake of their family or other sentimental interests.13 While this claim was variously contested, it was generally resolved by denying the possibility of a working-class “femininity.” Female factory workers were upheld in the early part of the century as unexpectedly feminine, by their cleanliness and fine clothes, but even more by their lack of necessity and their eagerness to marry and retire to household work—manufacturing interests claimed that women generally worked for adventure and spending money before marriage, and not for subsistence. Female performers and writers had a tenuous claim on femininity, so long as they followed a very strict rhetoric delimiting their performance, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s claiming that Uncle Tom’s Cabin arrived as an inspiration from God, or female reformers’ embracing the nation as a sort of extended family, rightfully under the influence of their spiritualizing interest.
For the most part, upper- and middle-class women were excluded from earning a living and simultaneously retaining feminine respectability; but while they could not earn things, they were required at least to possess enough to demonstrate industry and self-discipline in the use of their things. Femininity, therefore, required a preparation for upward mobility, while masculinity required its own version of ambition, discipline, and hard work. The aristocrat and the minister were incidental industrial products. Aristocrats, such as Hepzibah’s immediate family in Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, wealthy plantation owners, or possibly the bachelors in Melville’s “Paradise of Bachelors” would have been constrained from entering the workforce by their own class pretensions, but could enjoy their wealth without visibly laboring to earn it. Those choosing not to “get” troubled the material economy; leisure was morally suspect in the nineteenth century. Ministers, philosophers, and scholars might have chosen to direct their energies towards spiritual or intellectual pursuits; though they demonstrated through their education an access to goods, they also lost status from this perceived insult to materialism. Both the philosopher class and the aristocracy became “feminized” when they shunned material production: we can see reaction to this taint perhaps in the ritualized masculinity of southern chivalry and in the fierce assertions of masculinity posed by Transcendentalists in the figure of Man Thinking.14
Furthermore, the posture of “not desiring” entailed extreme care to negate the possible insult to capitalism. Feminine women and ministers could only maintain status through an all-pervading claim to spirituality, so that it became not a denial of materialism but an ambition to heaven as greater—and heaven was then furnished with the properties of the home, which women could desire without restraint. This claim came at the cost of an unforgiving moral purity, however; the greedy minister or the fallen, “compromised” woman, belying their non-spiritual desire, could not be allowed to remain in their place.
Lower-class Caucasian citizens remained in a racially liminal position—neither white nor black—and their goods and skin were suitably colored. Gender applied less to the working class: laboring women could be thick-waisted and manly, and the muscularity of a laboring man’s body was tied more to animal qualities than to masculinity. The “poor white trash,” marked by their lack of ambition, may have been for some ranked below the slaves, as they deliberately squandered their potential whiteness. Theirs was the lot of those who insulted materialism by “not wanting” without the protection of moral purity as an excuse. Their dirt or trash classified them: they had scant membership in the system at all.15
In emphasizing the white thing as a social agent, I do not seek to add to “race, class, and gender” the category of “things,” but rather to locate the foundation of this triad in the material world and transpose its terms into more nineteenth-century terms. Many recent studies show a complex relationship among race, class, and gender organization. For example, Nakayama and Martin assert that “whiteness, like other categories, is ‘leaky’; that is, race can only be seen in relation to other categories, such as class, gender, sexuality, and so on, that render any category problematic” (15). Monika M. Elbert assures us that “certainly it is absurd to consider gender as a category by itself—outside the attendant realms of race and class” (2). On the other hand, when they are broken down to their simplest material definitions, the defining social categories become names for one’s relationship to things—names which, when folded into our own contemporary understandings of the triad of terms, serve to confuse relationships and groups. The terms of the triad were only just gaining meaning in the early nineteenth century—even “masculine” and “feminine” were being redefined, socially and materially—and their boundaries were slippery.16 “Race” was used to mean any group of people, a nationality, a profession; “class” was denied even to exist because of Old World definitions that did not fit perfectly.17 There was not a determinant triad: there were different relationships to the things that were becoming more plentiful and more demanding.
Building from this popular antebellum view of the way things built salient social categories, we can see the way authors and consumers reacted against and within their material boundaries. Continually refined, continually contested, the notions involving race, class, and gender challenge scholars who attempt to examine these notions in historical settings. By focusing on the material object as a constituent agent of these ideas, my work pinpoints visible moments of social construction—its physical setting, the limits of its reach, and who was implicated. For example, in whiteness studies, scholars distinguish racism from the racial acts performed by individuals and define various types of “whiteness” according to the many classes of white people that exist. A material culture view need not struggle with the “monolith” of whiteness—it is, at most, a piecemeal wall built from everyday things. Joe Kincheloe describes the field’s “ ‘prime directive’ ” for most of the past decade to be the “effort to define and reinvent the amorphous concept” of whiteness. This effort is frustrated by many aspects of its amorphousness: the conflation of whiteness with white people or with white privilege; the generality of whiteness that does not account for individual agency (Wiegman, “Whiteness Studies”); the conception of whiteness as a unified force denying diversity (which is addressed variously in studies of class and whiteness, gender and whiteness, or ethnicities and whiteness: for example, David Roediger, Alexander Saxton, Eric Lott); the normalization and invisibility of whiteness (Toni Morrison; Ruth Frankenberg, The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness). Such an elaboration of the frustrations is crucial in defining “whiteness,” I believe, and in clearing space for new questions and fruitful investigations. In the most definite delineation of whiteness, Ruth Frankenberg provides eight aspects, and nearly all attempt a physical expression of the idea: “Whiteness is a location … a ‘standpoint’ … a site of privilege … a site of elaboration … a product of history” (“Mirage” 76). On the other hand, when whiteness is approached as a material construct, it begins with such a concrete location, the thing; it demands everyday performances in its care and consumption; it depends upon visibility; its diversity comes from its many manipulators; it allows for individual use; and it has a definite shape.
Similarly, the field of gender studies has recently expressed frustration with the traditional monolithic view of nineteenth-century femininity.18 The question now being asked by gender scholars—“Were there separate spheres?”—attacks the binaric social fiction but relies upon an abstract notion that can always be complicated. Because nineteenth-century authors discussed and critiqued a popular belief in the “feminine sphere,” we can ask in a material approach, “What was the actual shape of the woman’s sphere as compared to its ideological designs?” and can locate it where white things were under the woman’s influence. Viewing femininity as “built” by the accumulation and control of white things, I place this idea of the “sphere” in physical terms, and it becomes instead an indefinitely marked territory: extant and visible, but also shifting. My approach contributes to concepts of class by treating the thing as more than commodity—as a social being apart from as well as within the marketplace—and by recognizing one’s skin as a thing to be valued and maintained. The archaeological approach is also particularly adept at identifying economic distinctions through artifacts, and it recovers a material past among the lower classes otherwise unrecorded.
The white thing, then, can become the handle for an abstract, ungraspable, and ideal concept. For nineteenth-century consumers and authors, the whiteness of the thing could become a part of a set, to be bought, cleaned, organized, displayed, and distributed. All of these social distinctions eventually, and primarily, devolved to race, as they considered whiteness or its lack in their formation. Race, as conceived in whiteness, was not so much a commodity as a collection of commodities and one’s relationship to them19—so that who used them, how they used them, how it affected them, and in what specific objects the users chose to invest their anxieties become essential to our understanding of antebellum race. Race was a description that incorporated color, possessions, ambition, and potentiality. It was, in addition, a problem for everyone in antebellum America: whiteness was not yet normalized, and white people were continually conscious of their color and its dangers, privileges, and social implications. These questions of what and who and how necessarily pulled into whiteness considerations of class, gender, and purity. Whiteness could not be understood apart from those consuming it, the upper and middle classes; nor from the key managers of it, white women; nor from the associations that they would like to borrow from it, spiritual and biological purity. And it could not be conceived apart from its opposite—blackness.
My chapters are shaped according to an approach to the white things, as a series of steps that clarify “whiteness’s” meaning. Chapter 1 elaborates on the appearances of white things as owned by the upper classes and planters and the contrast established through the darker things used by slaves. The archaeological data is culled from many sites and sources, treats a history of records concerning ceramics, houses, architecture, and gravestones, and ties these to statements made by their users and to their acknowledged racial implications. John Pendleton Kennedy, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs approach the material economy differently, manipulating the message of white things in order to enforce, invert, or disrupt its cultural work.
The second chapter moves to the acquisition and use of white goods, how they became involved in ritual demonstrations of class status or upwardly mobile merit. This chapter includes specialization of tableware, specialization of white houses, the organization of white gravestones into rural cemeteries, and the work-discipline derived from standardized use. The tea ritual, the factory, and the frontier town become substantial settings where the things of class must be constantly negotiated, and the blackness of slavery intrudes or upholds the negotiations. James Fenimore Cooper, Susanna Maria Cummins, and Edgar Allan Poe propose alternately masculine, feminine, and antiquarian responses to the rituals and etiquette of industry; Herman Melville exploits the connections between them, complicating the factory and the dinner table with gendered and racial protests.
The third chapter looks specifically at femininity as a complicated enactment of whiteness which complements masculinity but more deeply affects the status of black and lower-class men and women. This chapter highlights the corset as representative of the black-female-white-feminine relationship, but discusses also white furnishings, architecture, and clothing fashion. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, and E.D.E.N. Southworth produced best-selling sentimental novels that make the material connection between white things, black people, and femininity; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance reveals the operation of these powerful white signifiers from the viewpoint of a troubled male.
Chapter 4 returns to an explicitly racial focus in its investigation of the care and maintenance of white things. The anxieties resulting from an antebellum equation linking spiritual purity, hygienic purity, and racial purity are manifested in discussions of racial passing, scars and tattoos, and filth. White skin becomes the significant white thing, the visible marker of these purities and the anxious ground upon which definitions of “black” and “white” take place. Stowe’s Dred speaks for the tragic mulatto who cannot pass; Melville’s Moby Dick exposes skin as the basic commodity in Ahab’s quest; and Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills establishes filth as a measure of race and class status. Finally, Edgar Allan Poe interrogates the physical composition of beauty, femininity, and whiteness as he disassembles the body in “Berenice.”
These chapters investigate the problems and answers presented by one nineteenth-century assemblage, everyday white things, as utilized by those supportive of or antagonistic to their cultural work. In emphasizing both physical usefulness and visible color in things as they appear in households and literary settings, my study remains necessarily general: each set of artifacts, such as gravestones or ceramics, also warrants its own focused study. Things united by use, geography, or other appearance might undergo similar examination. Just as important as establishing a salient site of investigation, however, is an understanding of the central actors’ relationship to the material things. The relationships that define “masculine,” “feminine,” “lower class” and “slave,” as I have presented them, belong to an emergent capitalist, Anglo-American (white) viewpoint; and the dissenting voices propose alternate, inverted, or conflicting ways to relate—or even another set of things altogether. Certainly, my decision to locate my site in this industrialized whiteness leaves more areas suggested than addressed, including much of the vast population whose agency remains less visible in a capitalistic economy. In using the average consumer and the well-circulated author as my foundation, my work remains tied to the questions concerning these people and their self-conscious attempts to answer them. In focusing on these everyday concerns with a material lens, however, my work uncovers entire unarticulated conversations between author and reader, consumer and viewer—discussing issues too incendiary, ideological, or perhaps too intimate for open debate.