| Critical accounts of the role of the father in nineteenth-century American literature have often considered this figure something of an immutable given, against which the oppressed voices of the age were invariably obliged to contend. However, antebellum representations of the father figure in the novels of canonical writers James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and in the non-canonical work of Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, and Fanny Fern, present a more complex picture. Their respective explorations of both public patriarchy and private fatherhood expose the volatile, inconclusive nature of both public and private life in mid-nineteenth-century America, as the fluidity of market culture resisted the imposition of any static social, economic, or political order. The inclusion of William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) illustrates the continuity in literature of the role antebellum writers ascribed their father figures, as Howells uses his fictional fathers to explore the stark economic and social realities of postbellum American life.; Fictional representations of public and private father figures in antebellum American literature were shaped by the enormous economic transformations that characterized the nation in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Fictional fathers therefore have distinctly mediatory roles as they navigate the increasingly irreconcilable worlds of marketplace and family. The novels included in this study chart a progressive shift away from identifiable public patriarchs whose power is centered around the land, toward publicly anonymous, urban-dwelling, and fundamentally privatized fathers. Such a transformation came about largely due to the fact that America's growing economic complexity served to render public life more and more ungraspable. Therefore, while Cooper, Melville, and even Hawthorne represent landed, public patriarchy, with its manifold shortcomings and contradictions, the fictions of Warner, Cummins, Fern, and finally Howells work to create an urbanized father-provider figure, who ideally represents a fortuitous conflation of economic prosperity and domestic harmony. In all cases, the fictional attempt by antebellum novelists to create and manage their mediatory fathers constitutes an attempt to explain and contain, with varying degrees of success, disturbing economic forces at play in mid-nineteenth-century American life. |
