The logic of intimacy in maritime writing: Sailors, gender, and citizenship, 1776--1851

By locating the sailor in the context of a transatlantic dialogue on intimacy, The Logic of Intimacy reveals the centrality of the figure of the manly sailor to representations of citizenship. In maritime writing, figurations of collective identity take place through what I call charismatic individualism when a singular, readily distinguishable individual becomes a focus of communal attention. In many maritime works, charisma verifies the natural privilege of white men because writers of nautical literature tend to locate charisma in the empowered white male body.; Especially in the US, maritime writers use intimate friendship among seamen to show that the production of the individual citizen involves engineering proper feeling for other men, for women, and for the nation. The manly, charismatic sailor is an exemplary figure in the project of understanding the role of feeling in liberal citizenship. I also discuss works of eighteenth-century thought, poems, popular balladry, personal narratives, voyages, and naval documents that situate the seafarer in his social, economic, and cultural milieux. This into writing by and about seafarers leads to a reexamination of the critical assumption that liberal citizenship in the US depends upon a celebration of socially isolated, emotionally inviolate white men. In adventure fiction, individuation actually depends upon emotional connections. The project's focus on manhood, individuality, and charisma leads to new interpretations of fiction by Tobias Smollett, Olaudah Equiano, Philip Freneau, Royall Tyler, William Williams, James Fenimore Cooper, Captain Frederick Marryat, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville.; Contemporary theoretical discussions of individualism and democratic citizenship tend to describe the social processes that led to the ascendancy of the abstract, disinterested subject in nineteenth-century liberal thought. In contrast, the chapters described above detail how transatlantic seafaring narratives dramatize loving relationships among men, underlining the social and affective production of individuality through charisma and heterosexuality. By both acknowledging and moving beyond the interpretive schema of "homosociality," and by directing inquiry away from emphases on the supposed social isolation of male adventurers, my discussions of maritime fiction reveal the strategic importance of love and friendship to fictions usually read through the individualistic lens of male enterprise.