Graduate Program

English

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2007

Thesis Director

Christopher Hanlon

Thesis Committee Member

Angela Vietto

Thesis Committee Member

Dana Ringuette

Abstract

The American slavery crisis reached a pinnacle during the time from postrevolution to the mid-nineteenth century, resulting in the most devastating loss of American life to date - the Civil War. Emotions about race and slavery ran high during this antebellum period, and many extremists on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line used the power of written language for their cause; many Americans, conversely, appeared indifferent to a race of people who neither directly affected them nor engaged their interest. That indifference itself played a role in the debate of race and slavery, which progressively reached a vast audience in the forms of journals, letters, debates, speeches, narratives and other non-fiction. Fictional literature of this period must accordingly embody some account of this political dimension, though that reflection is not always readily apparent.

Critical historicist scholarship has formed a well-trodden path around antebellum progressives such as Stowe, Emerson, Fuller, Douglass, and Child within the slavery debate; yet politically conservative antebellum authors have received a much more taciturn approach. This thesis examines the literature of Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, therefore, and historicizes them within the antebellum milieu. By identifying gaps in the critical discussions about these authors and their works, this thesis presents a distinctive approach-a combination of close reading and historical situating of each text- to the study of race and slavery within period works and offers new insights into the historical contexts surrounding canonized literature.

Washington Irving's political position on race, as discussed in the first chapter, registers a larger shift in attitudes toward race in America, a shift underway during the height of Irving's success. The second chapter complicates existing approaches to Edgar Allan Poe and his views on race in a manner that reveals his "average trepidation" over the ramifications of slavery. The third chapter focuses on the racial politics of Nathaniel Hawthorne; this reading of The Scarlet Letter indicates a more intricate approach toward those politics than has yet been recognized.

These three canonical antebellum authors, and their fiction's exposed sentiments on race and slavery, reveal a progression from ambivalence to abolitionism, thus reflecting the widespread shift in many American attitudes toward "the peculiar institution" by the mid-nineteenth century. As each chapter shows, the critical discussion surrounding these three authors and their racial politics demanded a fresh examination. For that reason, this investigation into the fictional works of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, therefore, illustrates that evaluating antebellum fiction as either black or white on the issues of race and slavery is a complex task-the intriguing and sometimes implicating facets of politicized fiction, moreover, are often found within the copious shades of gray.

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