The culture of promises: Literary ethics and American cultural politics, 1820--1870 (Harriet Jacobs, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne)

My dissertation analyzes the representation of promises in nineteenth-century American literature as a form of ethical, cultural, and political practice and discourse. I refer to this confluence of practice and discourse, of action and thought, as the nineteenth century's “culture of promises.” I argue that within the literature of the period there was a sustained debate over the values of a promise-based culture. One line of argument saw promises as a stabilizing force at the level of individual and society. Another saw promises as effective tools authors might use for progressive social critique and advocating social reform. Still another saw promises as conservative relics incompatible with the newer order of commerce and dislocation. To make this argument, I develop two concepts—“literary contractarianism” and “nation-building”—to explain the cultural work promises perform in American literature. With these terms, I suggest how novels in particular may well fill the gap in nineteenth-century American philosophy regarding social contract theory, and I argue that through novels authors could propose models of social relation and, in doing so, participate in the larger project of the early national nation-building.; I focus primarily on fiction and specifically on novels, but I do consider one novelized autobiography and other texts that represent promising. I analyze writings by Catharine Sedgwick, Hawthorne, Melville, and Harriet Jacobs. My research draws on work in literary criticism, cultural history, political theory, philosophy, and the histories of economics and law. Because little sustained analysis has been given to the representation of promises in American literature, my work offers a set of questions and interpretations for making sense of what has more often than not been seen as the ubiquitous, but hollow tool of sentimental rhetoric. My project challenges this dismissal of literary promises, and it seeks to offer a systematic account of why so many American novels are inordinately saturated with promises.{09}It also suggests how we might see these promises as part of a larger philosophical and political debate about the nature of American democratic culture and social membership.