Summary
Harriet Beecher Stowe's symbolic celebration of uncultivated, heterogeneous, swampy growth as an alternative to whites' paternalistic uplift efforts in Dred; Zitkala-Sa's critique of the Americanizing technology that separated her from the Edenic world of her Sioux childhood; and Toni Morrison's response to the history of black women's institutionalized dehumanization in Beloved, all draw upon the domestic literary tradition and America's history of domestication narratives.
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Extract
The Savage in the House
IN 'THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE' Nathaniel Hawthorne captures Victorian America's obsession with domestication: better nature through human intervention. The novel figures Zenobia, one of its two central women, as a spectacular but short-lived, hothouse flower. Miles Coverdale, captivated by Zenobia's distinctive charms, selects her vigorous bloom as preferable to the feminine delicacy admired by the cultivated classes. In his first description of her, Coverdale focuses on the colorful blossom adorning her abundant hair. That "exotic" accessory, "as fresh as if the hot-house gardener had just clipt it from the stem ... So brilliant, so rare . . . and yet enduring for only a day," he muses, "has struck deep root into my memory." The flower facilitates a reader's understanding of its wearer, whom Coverdale describes as "an admirable figure of a woman . . . with a combination of features which it is safe to call remarkably beautiful, even if some fastidious persons might pronounce them a little deficient in softness and delicacy." Though a flower most commonly represents the beauty of simple, unmolested nature, Coverdale points out that Zenobia's "costly" indulgence, worn in the midst of a New England snow storm, signals the "pride and pomp" that "had a luxuriant growth in Zenobia's character" (15). In a modernizing New England, the distinctive exotic is a commodity made available only through the machinations of international trade and involved horticulture-it is a telling product of a new America, fast moving from its status as an isolated agrarian nation into its role as a significant player in international trade and global politics. And in Coverdale's qualified salute to Zenobia's robust, earthy, and rather theatrical womanhood, we see antebellum Americans' competing desires for untrammeled nature and careful control. An icon of a contradictory age, Zenobia, like the hothouse flower she wears, is both shockingly natural and stunningly cultivated. She manifests Americans' delight in the signs of their nation's development, and their fears about the potential dangerous outcomes of that development.
In this essay I look at how the concept of domestication functioned in antebellum Americans' negotiations of their ambivalence about the sudden changes taking place in their nation-the emergence of a new age of intellectual, moral, social, and political sophistication and diversity in the United States. Depictions of women like Hawthorne's Zenobia, I argue, are signs of the times-a period in which both domestic ideology and scientific theory had become pervasive elements of everyday life in America. The literature of the day-most notably the sentimental domestic novels that Nina Baym has dubbed "woman's fiction"-is full of women whose selection and cultivation participates in popular and scientific discourses of domestication. Portrayals of such selection and cultivation-what I will call here "domestication narratives"-are sites at which domesticity and science intersect in the cultural...See the full content of this document
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