Class difference and the struggle for cultural authority: Rereadings of Sedgwick, Emerson, Whitman and Hemingway

This dissertation advances the thesis that four of the major developments which distinguish the American literary canon---Catharine Sedgwick's domestic fiction, Ralph Emerson's transcendentalist essays and lectures, Walt Whitman's experiments in poetic form, and Ernest Hemingway's modernist aesthetic---had their geneses in these authors' fraught engagements with class otherness.In chapter three, I remind my readers that Whitman was deeply troubled by the number of young urban roughs who failed to meet his standards for healthy, democratic manhood. Having come of age in the post-1837 depression era, Whitman believed that only the most robust and temperate of men could manage the demands of a competitive labor market while resisting the urban smorgasbord of vicious amusements. In the 1840s and 50s, he dedicated a tremendous amount of energy to persuading the maladjusted young men of the city to reform themselves after the pattern of his own physical and mental health.In chapter four, I examine the strategy that Hemingway developed early in his career to masculinize his literary form and content. His creative process involved the assimilation of the expressions, techniques, and experiences of those class and racial others who he believed had greater access to authentic masculinity. His carefully constructed public identity---the iconic Hemingway image---is a fascinating and troubling collage of these class and race "borrowings."This dissertation underscores the fact that many of our most compelling and innovative American authors were deeply and anxiously involved in the construction of class identities and the negotiation of class interests.In chapters one and two, I contend that Sedgwick's most popular works of domestic fiction and Emerson's most original philosophical contrivances were sophisticated responses to the alarming proximity of working-class political agitation. In my reading, Sedgwick's domestic gospels of the 1830s and Emerson's seminal texts of transcendentalism were composed in an anxious effort to stem the swelling tide of working-class radicalism and reinforce the cultural and political authority of the formally educated, propertied elite.