1. At slave sites on Cannon’s Point plantation in Georgia, John Solomon Otto finds these coarse earthenwares to comprise almost 70 percent of the ceramic sherds found (105). Leland Ferguson finds that 70 percent of the ceramics found on 23 South Carolina slave sites to be the dark, hand-made “Colono ware” (“Struggling” 31).
2. I draw here mainly from Deetz’s observations in In Small Things Forgotten (1977) and “Material Culture and Worldview in Colonial Anglo-America” (1988).
3. Henry Glassie’s Folk Housing in Middle Virginia (1975) uncovers a “house grammar” which assigns specific mathematical formulas in creating house plans dating to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
4. For example, Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), argues consumption as a form of cultural production.
5. One specific example of a product as opposed to an assemblage would be the topsy-turvy doll, which was a black woman at one end, and beneath her skirts, when flipped over, appeared to be a white woman. Shirley Samuels uses this product as an excellent illustration of the relationships between black and white women during the time of its popularity (“The Identity of Slavery”). The thing tied to a specific historical event would be, for example, the “Log Cabin” presidential campaign of 1840, which had a discrete duration and purpose (see, for example, Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America, 1990).
6. See, for example, Khalil Husni, “The Whiteness of the Whale”; Edward Stone, “The Whiteness of the Whale”; and Mary Blish, “The Whiteness of the Whale Revisited.”
7. The Pawtucket Gazette exclaims on July 15, 1856: “ ‘Talking of the ladies, they are getting bigger and bigger. They fill up the sidewalks. As they brush by you, you feel bones—whalebones, I mean, for there are no others within a mile of you.” The whalebone cage for skirts “reached its height of popularity in 1859” (Torrens 192).
8. In his study of recreation in the late nineteenth century, Brown sets two tasks: “The archival/archaeological task … consists of developing a chain of associations that seem, retrospectively, to have converged already in the literary work. The analytical task consists in representing that convergence as an image that freshly elucidates the signifying structures and material changes of everyday life—the task, in other words, of producing the history that lingers within neglected images, institutions, and objects” (The Material Unconscious 4–5).
9. William Carlos Williams, in “A Sort of a Song” (1944): “through metaphor to reconcile/the people and the stones./Compose. (No ideas/but in things)” (46).
10. “Passing,” entirely dependent on a social rather than a visual designation of “black,” could therefore be a source of anxiety and possible violence, because seen as a way of cheating the system.
11. Narrative 105, 107. Douglass’s stupor is immediately contrasted in this passage to the “beautiful vessels, robed in purest white”—ships in the Chesapeake—that represent freedom for him (Narrative 107).
12. I argue in chapter 1 that Douglass does not invest in this system, which nonetheless excludes him from the privilege of white “masculinity”; instead, he inverts the system and rhetorically takes on the master’s role, while the reader is cast into a slave’s perspective.
13. As Lucy Larcom claims, “ ‘Inanimate objects do gather into themselves something of the character of those who live among them, through association; and this alone makes heirlooms valuable. They are family treasures, because they are part of the family life, full of memories and inspirations. Bought or sold, they are nothing but old furniture’ ” (qtd. in Gillian Brown 46).
14. See, for example, Ann Douglas’s work, The Feminization of America (1977), which casts ministers as among the first feminized. Emerson links scholars to clergy and asserts that the “action” of the former makes them more masculine: “I have heard it said that the clergy,—who are always … the scholars of their day,—are addressed as women …. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise” (“The American Scholar” 70).
15. I am aware that this mainstream understanding of crucial social categories participates in excluding many dominant groups of United States citizens; it demonstrates, perhaps, how such excluded groups continue to be overlooked. In fact, beyond a possible way of viewing antebellum social constructions, this approach to things may also help to illuminate troubling gaps in the attention of literary history.
16. See, for example, Christine Stansell’s City of Women (1986) and Diana DiZierga Wall’s The Archaeology of Gender (1994).
17. Michael Banton traces a history of the term “race.” In the eighteenth century, the term suggested “commonality of descent or character”; in the nineteenth, it referred to nation and national character (51).
18. For example, the “No More Separate Spheres!” issue of American Literature, 1998.
19. As argued by David Roediger in The Wages of Whiteness, racial whiteness is a commodity conferring privilege for the price of industrial work-discipline and capitalist individualism.
1. Frederick Douglass in Narrative of the Life describes eating from a trough (72). Writing decades later, Booker T. Washington cannot recall “a single instance during [his] childhood” when his family “ate a meal in a civilized manner.” Instead, “meals were gotten by the children very much as dumb animals get theirs”—random scraps for children, perhaps a “tin plate held on the knees” for others (9).
2. Samuels claims that both pro-slavery and anti-slavery positions exhibited, “from different sides, the tension between attempts to inscribe the black-white identity of and in the body, and attempts to escape such a biologized essentialism or biological design or destiny” (160).
3. In Folk Housing in Middle Virginia, Henry Glassie studies Virginia’s vernacular architecture from colonial settlement to the twentieth century. Deetz extends Glassie’s observations to include New England as well, and Anglo-American architecture in general (In Small Things Forgotten).
4. Glassie sees the shift to a universal whiteness to be signify democratization, since class distinctions were no longer the basis for house color (Folk Housing 156). Glassie also reads in the shift from unsegmented, asymmetrical houses to the many-roomed Georgian houses a national change in mindset. Once embracing a more communal outlook, he argues, people now showed in their houses that they valued “the closed over the open, the practical over the aesthetic, the private over the public, the artificial over the natural” (Folk Housing 162).
5. Folk Housing 156. Glassie cites Richard M. Candee’s Housepaints in Colonial America for the assertion of whiteness (2–3, 11–12). Richard Bushman also points to the evolution of houses to white in The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992).
6. Ruskin 167. This source is indebted to Glassie’s mention of it in “Folk Art” 127.
7. Deetz, “Material Culture and Worldview in Colonial Anglo-America” 223. “Assemblage” refers to the entire collection of one type of artifact from a specific site or area. Here the area is Colonial Anglo-America.
8. Outside of church graveyards in developed cities, investigating the scattered folk cemeteries of the South is time intensive and therefore limited. Early Gravestone Art in Georgia and South Carolina (1986) by Diana Williams Combs compares Northern traditions to the styles found in Southern churchyards; Texas Graveyards: A Cultural Legacy (1982) by Terry G. Jordan discusses folk cemeteries. Ruth M. Little in Sticks and Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers (1998) investigates rural graveyards in North Carolina; Roberta Hughes Wright and Wilbur B. Hughes III focus on African American cemeteries in Lay Down Body: Living History in African American Cemeteries (1996).
9. Perhaps coincidentally, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, as upper-class English women were bleaching their hands with arsenic to make them whiter, Wedgwood produced a black tea kettle. While serving tea, women could display themselves against this black vessel “to enhance the whiteness of the hands” (Kowaleski-Wallace 29). I am unaware of a similar production for the American market. On the whole, wealthy American consumers preferred silver teapots or white ceramic sets.
10. Marion Starling, cited in Kawash 53. Kawash also notes a quilt with this design that was presented to Garrison, and transparent window blinds embossed with the scene.
11. Of course, the predominance of these types also can reflect that slaves were not allowed to earn their own money, or that if they did, they chose not to spend it on dishes. Nonetheless, the former suggests that planters might have feared their slaves’ gaining a sense of individuality from ownership. The latter may also suggest that the power of the white dishes remained in the minds of the whites and not the slaves.
12. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., discusses this initial lack of knowledge suffered by Douglass as a contrast to the calendar knowledge afforded the white boys in the narrative in “Binary Oppositions.”
13. Solomon Low’s marker is in the Unitarian churchyard, and the latter rests in St. John’s Lutheran. The name is barely legible, but may be “Sarah Gieller.” These are the post-1800 slate stones I observed in my fieldwork, although they are likely not the only ones. The French Huguenot Church, the Circular Congregational Church, and the Bethel M. E. Church were inaccessible at the time I visited. I did, however, visit St. Mary’s, St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal, St. Michael’s Protestant Episcopal, the First Baptist, the First (Scots) Presbyterian, the Unitarian, and St. John’s Lutheran Churches downtown.
14. In Savannah’s historic downtown cemetery, Colonial Park, operating from 1750 to 1853, this uniformity continues, marked by one interesting phenomenon. There are only fourteen legible nonwhite stones dating from after 1800 in the cemetery. However, of the fourteen, seven are for children, and three more for related adults who died around the same time as the children. Of the four remaining, two are gray slate and proclaim the deceased’s Northern origins, and one appears less professional with etching rather than engraving and initials scratched into the base. The last is a simple anomaly: William C. Mills, aged 37 years, who died in 1827, has a gray slate stone.
15. On the other hand, the inland graveyards may show more variety, since overland shipping would have added to the cost of imported stones.
16. Family gravesites, scattered and poorly preserved, may not have shown such a uniform transition to white marble—I have not evaluated research on what remains of these. Such stones, however, would have been intended less for public display, and therefore their visual message would be less insistent.
17. Black slate enjoyed a brief resurgence of popularity at Mount Auburn in the years surrounding 1900 as well.
18. Hazel Carby, for example, begins her analysis of Jacobs with the assertion, “Jacobs used the material circumstances of her life to critique conventional standards of female behavior and to question their relevance and applicability to the experience of black women” (47).
19. Yellin acknowledges Jacobs’s “melodramatic confessions” as accommodations to the Cult of Domesticity, but argues that her combination of the genres of slave narrative and domestic novel creates a “new voice” (xiv). Valerie Smith believes that Jacobs’s tale is limited by sentimental conventions (xxxiii). On the other hand, Hazel Carby and Claudia Tate argue that Jacobs rejects these values.
20. Although I would distinguish the narrator Linda Brent from the author Harriet Jacobs, I draw from the lives of both, which Jean Fagan Yellin has found similar enough to warrant (Yellin 223–225). Therefore, for the sake of clarity and brevity, I will refer to Jacobs’s autobiographical character as “Jacobs” also.
21. An explanation of the progressive planters’ perception of their slaves as filthy, and their attempts to control their slaves and better supervise them by imposing standards of cleanliness, appears in chapter 4.
22. Yellin 216. I will assume that Jacobs draws on actual experiences and manipulates their presentation to suit her ends. Therefore, diagrams of Jacobs’s actual house can inform the narrative, showing the starting point from which Jacobs constructs her work.
23. Thomas B. Lovell suggests that Jacobs’s view of domesticity is not antithetical to market economics as in the “sentimental tradition”; rather, as a slave, Jacobs shows that “outside of a properly organized wage system, the practice of the moral principles associated with sentimentalism is impossible” (2).
24. Ferguson, “Struggling” 31. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Ferguson notes, “most African-American slaves had stopped making earthenware,” and in the South the Catawba Indians were the main producers of such unrefined earthenware (35). His arguments apply, therefore, to slave potters of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century: the beginnings of the whitening trend.
1. Michael T. Gilmore presents a detailed social reading of “Bartleby” in American Romanticism and the Marketplace (1985); in addition, Wai Chi Dimock examines the narrator’s conflicting use of old-fashioned and emergent capitalist attitudes when dealing with his employees (“Class, Gender, and a History of Metonymy”).
2. Dimock 80–81. Bill Brown’s The Material Unconscious (1996) discusses recreation as a serious pastime beginning only in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
3. In The Wages of Whiteness (1991), Roediger examines minstrel plays as a response among Northern white working-class men to the pressures of industry. While the emerging factory work emphasized regulated, disciplined behavior, these plays romanticized slave life and located carefree, sensual, and undisciplined behavior within a black skin. The bodily freedoms given up by a successful worker became part of “blackness” and slavery. Thus, Roediger argues, while “whiteness” included the undesirable abandoning of pre-industrial freedoms, it compensated white workers by privileging whiteness ideologically. In addition, Eric Lott argues that minstrelsy’s definition of “whiteness” united whites of upper and lower classes, helping to alleviate class tension while contrasting them with a distant, enslaved, black population.
4. The source areas from which Kniffen traces westward-spreading architectural trends are New England, the Middle Atlantic including Pennsylvania, and the lower Chesapeake centered from Tidewater Virginia and including the Gulf coast (10). Within these regions, two distinct “cultures” also appear: urban and rural (6).
5. Kniffen 10. In the Middle Atlantic area, the English I-house and German log construction were popular. Working with logs entails certain difficulties: logs can usually be only twenty-four or thirty feet long and remain manageable, and with notched logs, the size of the log becomes the length of the wall. Adhering to the symmetry and style of the I-house was so important, however, that dog-run and saddlebag techniques were developed to allow builders to construct I-houses despite these difficulties. In these designs, essentially two log houses were roofed over together with an intervening space. These styles spread throughout the Appalachian area, branching westward and southward to include most of the country south of New England except for the coastal South (Kniffen 12).
6. See, for example, Michael Clark’s “Caves, Houses, and Temples in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers,” which includes a summary of preceding articles on architecture as well.
7. For dinner, Catharine Beecher recommends, the top plate should be placed upside-down, so as to keep off dust (Treatise on Domestic Economy 354).
8. Wall, Archaeology 148–149. After 1850, British white ironstone became popular, and its colorless relief molding was viewed as elegant in its simplicity.
9. The mistress served the soup, the first course, which Wall suggests showed her role as “family nurturer,’ while the master served the main meat dish, demonstrating his role as “family provider” (Wall, Archaeology 148).
10. Quoted from Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret 222. Elizabeth Kowalski-Wallace discusses the tea-table as stage for upper-class British white women in the eighteenth century, viewing the ritual as a series of showcased poses and self-conscious statements for the female body. Her investigation of British literary tea scenes, however, reveals an emphasis on female aristocratic display that is not emphasized in nineteenth-century American counterparts Consuming Subjects (1997). For American women, the scene may be similar, but the woman’s use of tea thing becomes important: her tea ritual is labor, not leisure.
11. Scholarly readings of Poe’s story vary drastically with every author—from David Ketterer, who argues that Poe “is the devil in the belfry” disrupting fixed visions of the world, to Katrina E. Bachinger, who sees the story as Poe’s critique of contemporary “programmed greenings of society,” or Christopher J. Forbes, who sees in the story a satire of Washington Irving (Ketterer 4; Bachinger 514).
12. See, for example, Mrozowski and Beaudry 195, 197, 199.
13. Critical response to the diptych focuses on the “unhealthy sexuality” of the bachelors, and its implications on the maids’ economic oppression (Karcher, Shadow 124). Building on a common understanding that “Paradise” explores homosexual retreats, Robyn Wiegman argues that both stories point to male bonding and patriarchal control, which depends on the exclusion of women and the lower classes (“Melville’s Geography”); Philip Young notes biographically that Melville was expecting his third child while writing these stories, so they reveal the pressures of providing for a family and the terror of a seemingly unstoppable baby machine (“The Machine in Tartarus”).
14. As Wai Chee Dimock and Judith A. McGaw report, Melville saw both men and women working at the Dalton paper mill he visited, so that his decision to people his fictional factory with only women was deliberate (Dimock 85).
15. “Paradise” 204. David Harley Serlin argues that this setting, identified as female, provides a heterosexual symbolism that undercuts the “dangerous, abstract sexuality” of the bachelors and their control over their cloistered world (82).
16. Kasson 137. The narrator, as Bachelor Nine, supplies an anecdote as well, entitled “The Paradise of Bachelors.”
17. Karcher, Shadow 122. Marvin Fisher suggests that “Virginny” may be a specific girl, or the “virgin New World” (85).
18. Moseley 13. James A. Bland’s “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” was published in 1878.
19. “Tartarus” in Melville, Great Short Works 220. A gestational and sexual reading of “Tartarus” was nearly commonplace when Richard Chase discussed it in 1949 (Herman Melville). Young taunts his audience with the obviousness of this claim: “Little can be done (unless by psychiatry) for the few who have claimed there is no ‘gestation symbolism’ in ‘Tartarus.’ Those who have missed it can be helped. The problem is with those who understand well enough and think that the tale is essentially a Melvillean denunciation of the industrial revolution” (213). Wiegman also reads in the scenery and various factory mechanisms diverse male and female body parts (“Melville’s Geography”).
1. Among the articles in the “No More Separate Spheres!” issue of American Literature (September 1998) and the recent Separate Spheres No More (2000), the feminine sphere is variously imagined as the generic conventions and responses to women’s novels; as the distinction between private versus public space, home versus market—distinctions that might be complicated by including race, class, and regional considerations; as submissive versus aggressive behavior. While no scholar disputes that an idea of a “separate sphere” indeed existed, although mainly for white, middle- and upper-class women, the projects seek to move “away from separatism to a reconciliation or a blurring of the spheres” (Elbert 9).
2. Cited in Piepmeier 215–216. In “Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America” (1999), Piepmeier examines the figures of Sojourner Truth, Sarah Josepha Hale, Anna Cora Mowatt, and Mary Baker Eddy as their careers placed them in the public realm, arguing that these women constructed bodily representations that worked against the common conception of domestic, disembodied femininity.
3. See, for example, Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture.
4. On only a few stones in Charleston’s historic churchyards are men seen grieving over an urn: for example, the stone of Mrs. Mary Ann Elizabeth Cogdell. This stone was carved by her own son, a Charleston sculptor, in 1827, and depicted the three Cogdell sons in classical garb (Combs 191).
5. Blumenson 23. A more detailed enumeration of the architectural and ceramic evolution of white things appears in chapter 1.
6. Roberson 3, 14. Interestingly, Roberson observes, the little black girl is able to contest Mrs. Montgomery’s absolute spirituality, suggesting that her pious insistence on honesty does not take into account the starvation based on racist economics suffered by Rebecca and her mother.
7. Alice goes on to discuss France and Italy.
8. Stowe was immediately criticized for her Liberian solution offered in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Although she changed this stance by the time she wrote Dred, one might see that her expunging of the black characters is not altogether racist, but simply the final alternative after all other domestic arrangements have failed. Gillian Brown offers an excellent argument on the domestic negotiations involving slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Domestic Individualism (1990).
9. Cited in Gillian Brown 53. In Brown’s argument, “What begins in UTC as an antislavery, anti-market protest culminates in a critique of labor relations and valorization of independent housekeeping. Reliance on servants threatens Stowe’s revisionary economy by perpetuating aristocratic distinctions consigning physical labor to a lower class” (53).
10. While Gillian Brown proposes Miss Ophelia’s system of order as Stowe’s ideal, I would argue that Stowe sees through the prevailing politics of dishware: Miss Ophelia is herself a “bond-slave of ’ought,’ ”—meaning that her inflexible obsession with order causes her to over-exert herself in order to produce cleanness (Uncle Tom’s 152).
11. Rachel’s kitchen might serve as another model kitchen. As Quakers were portrayed as politically neutral in the civil debate over slavery, the kitchen’s decor marks it as existing outside of time and therefore beyond the influence of slavery. It is neither whitened nor blackened, but merely a homey kitchen run by a nurturing mother. It has an immaculate yellow floor, “rows of shining tin” where food has been stored, “glossy green wood chairs,” and an adored rocking chair: furniture which, like Rachel’s drab clothing, defies fashion (129). And of course, she does her own labor within its walls.
12. Lynette Carpenter argues that the novel exposes the similarities between contrasts, particularly male and female, white and nonwhite, house and asylum; Joanne Dobson discusses the novel as a safe subversion of mid-nineteenth-century gender norms (“The Hidden Hand”); Alfred Habegger believes that overt sexuality, rather than gender play, is problematized in the novel.
13. After shooting Mr. Le Noir in a duel, for example, Capitola rides to town and “up to the ladies’ entrance” of the hotel, and in this properly feminine space confesses her “crime” (371).
14. 133, 284. Marah Rocke is also perfectly feminine, but also from the lower class and one of the “hard-working children of toil.” She wears a black mourning dress with a “pure white collar around her throat” and has a “pale olive complexion” (63).
1. The thesis of whiteness as a choice is clearly and persuasively argued in David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness.
2. In Mather’s estimation at the end of the eighteenth century, we should regard spiritual impurity with the same disgust we give physical filth: in fact, “ ‘the most Loathsome, Dirty, Nasty Object in the World, is not so Distastful unto us, as all Wickedness is unto our God’ ” (qtd. in Kathleen M. Brown 79).
3. The idea of blessedness as resulting from being “unstained” rather than from accumulated good deeds or divine election may have contributed to the Cult of Domesticity’s privileging of childhood. From efforts on earlier Puritans’ parts to distance themselves from their children, since they often died young and their afterlife was in doubt, early Victorians turned to a cult of motherhood that fostered the mother-child and parent-child bond. In 1721, for example, Benjamin Wadsworth wrote, ‘“ [children’s] Hearts naturally, are a meer nest, root, fountain of Sin, and wickedness’ ” (qtd. in Stannard 15). In 1842, the Reverend John H. Morison reflects a softer sentiment: “ ‘[t]heir angel influence shall remain unsullied by a breath from this sinful world’ ” (qtd. in Snyder 14). Children who died were therefore saved from any corruption of the marketplace and, unlike their Puritan foreparents, could be seen as having guaranteed sainthood. Theodore Cuyler assures grieving parents that their deceased children are now “ ‘safe; Christ has them in his sinless school, where lessons of celestial wisdom are learned by eyes that never weep’ ” (qtd. in Snyder 14). This change appears in the graveyard as sculpted lambs and sleeping infants atop children’s small marble tombstones, or the rare sculpted crib or child’s chair (Snyder 22, 24). At Mount Auburn Cemetery, the Noll children combine several of these images: one marker from 1859 shows a young child reclining with an angel bending over him, and the other from 1856 shows an older child resting on a lamb. In Charleston, South Carolina, many children’s stones have no dates, but infants can be seen kneeling and ascending through the clouds in marble relief (Unitarian Church).
4. In Gary Engle’s This Grotesque Essence 51. Although the song “Zip Coon” was published in 1834, this version of the minstrel was copyrighted in 1874.
5. David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness and Eric Lott’s Love and Theft discuss in detail the formulation of “whiteness” through the minstrelsy tradition.
6. While she includes physical traits, of course, they are centered on the face, revealing her “sentimental” beauty but still allowing for disembodiment.
7. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on the other hand, does attempt to re-form Uncle Tom spiritually into white.
8. Whitney 560. Lisa Whitney argues that “In Dred every white adult, no matter what his or her position on slavery, participates in the system as an oppressor” (560). Stowe herself suggests that escaping slaves prolong the institution, and that the underground railroad provides an “escape-valve”: “One has only to become acquainted with some of these fearless and energetic men who have found their way to freedom by its means, to feel certain that such minds and hearts would have proved, in time, an incendiary magazine under the scorching reign of slavery” (Dred 642–643).
9. Halttunen 88. She recounts a story appearing there, “The Fatal Cosmetic” (1839), in which a woman who paints her face allows herself other small deceits, and in telling a “white lie” ends up killing herself.
10. Typee 256. Samuel Otter similarly investigates Melville’s attention to the skin. With the tattooing in Typee and flogging in White-Jacket, he contends, Melville examines the relationship between racial minorities and whites, and between sailors and slaves. Marked skin and legible flesh unsettle Melville’s narrators because they blur the distinction between whiteness and blackness (“ ‘Race’ in Typee and White-Jacket”).
11. Only a focus on either Stubb’s insensitivity or the message of Fleece’s speech might save Fleece from being a mere perpetuation of “the most familiar comic distortion ever affixed to the Negro race” (Stone 359). Nonetheless, neither viewing Stubb’s treatment as brutish, as Edward Grejda suggests, nor reading a moral into Fleece’s speech humanizes Fleece from a blackface caricature (Grejda 125).
12. Eric Schocket concludes that though Davis’s mill workers are blackened by dirt and squalor, Davis offers the hope that they may yet be redeemed to whiteness. Dawn Henwood believes that while Davis was ambivalent in her position on slavery, her exposition of factory conditions revealed the relative comfort of the slave and her “contempt for the extreme position of abolitionism” (568). Henwood interpets Davis’s message to be that the slave is promised a better life (like the slavish river that will flow to greener pastures) while the mill worker is trapped.
13. According to Joan Dayan, the philosophies of Locke and Augustine combine to create “identity” from “teeth,” until “the final irradiation of the teeth rattling across the floor writes out the derangement of a brain” (“Identity” 492). Joel Porte argues that the vagina dentata motif reveals sexual anxiety (82). Jacqueline Doyle sees a critique of courtly love poetry in “(Dis)Figuring Woman: Edgar Allan Poe’s Berenice” (13). For Arthur A. Brown, the teeth are “the signifier and the thing itself,” and therefore represent the fear of undying promised through literature (452). Hal Blythe and Carlie Sweet argue against Twitchell’s assertion that the vampire material is “just added along the way” by outlining the ways in which “Berenice” becomes a successful though mocking vampire account (23).
14. Joan Dayan writes, “If women in nineteenth-century America must bear the trappings of style, must inhabit most fully the external as essence, Poe shows how such a spectacle both exploits and consumes its participant, both men and women” (“Romance and Race” 95).
1. Wright, Building 162. One recalls Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s critique of the sexist application of the rest cure that drives her heroine insane in “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). The walls play the main role in her insanity, however, and they are not white.
2. Shapiro 94. Shapiro describes, for example, a Ladies’ Home Journal meal consisting of boiled cod, mashed potatoes, rice, and macaroni pudding.