| Nineteenth-century America was defined on the boundary of interior consciousness and encroaching material concerns. With the rise of party politics, industrialization, labor unions, immigration, and social reform groups, the individual could no longer form a pure sense of interiority in the face of one's increasingly intrusive external environments.;This study will attempt to analyze the very heart of this mind/body, mental/physical correspondence. First, it will begin by looking closely at literary depictions of consciousness in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Edgar Allan Poe. Second, after considering both nineteenth-century contexts for these literary depictions and more contemporary philosophies on the mind/body problem, it will then construct useful models for how these writers' interior minds struggled, and ultimately failed, to overcome encroaching material concerns in their art. Finally, by superimposing these same models on a text/context plane, various alternative rhetorics of containment can be revealed in light of specific cultural, economic, and social frameworks.;The results of this New Historicist study reveal intriguing rhetorical relationships between Emerson and female mill-workers at Lowell, Poe and the rise of the asylum movement, and Thoreau and the Famine Irish immigrants. They illustrate how the nineteenth-century mind in America could never truly overcome the encroaching concerns of its material surroundings. |
