Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States . William Huntting Howell. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 305.
2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/685933
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)American History and Culture
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeBook ReviewAgainst Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States. William Huntting Howell. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 305.Yvette R. PiggushYvette R. PiggushCollege of St. Benedict and St. John’s University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAgainst Self-Reliance reintroduces us to the cultural construction of independence in the United States as a project based on imitation and dependence. William Huntting Howell extends and deepens our understanding of how postrevolutionary practices of cultural borrowing and transatlantic exchange impacted the concurrent development of republican subjectivity. Howell formulates the concept of the “arts of dependence” to describe a range of individual perspectives, activities, and cultural productions centered on imitation and repetition rather than on self-expression or autonomy. His work demonstrates how the early republic “imagin[ed] individuality without individualism” (20). It urges readers to rethink the extent to which autonomous liberal subjectivity coincides with the construction of independent lives and an independent country.Against Self-Reliance borrows (fittingly) part of its title from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay on “Self-Reliance.” In his introduction, Howell sets the stage for his investigation of American dependence by exploring how the best-known phrase from Emerson’s essay, “imitation is suicide,” overwrites a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century period when copying was essential to American independence and selfhood (3). The book’s chapters delineate three sets of unlikely pairs whose lives and works exemplify “the intimate mechanics of individual artistic, linguistic, and behavioral dependence” (10–11). Chapters 1 and 2 examine the continuities in Benjamin Franklin and Phillis Wheatley’s practices of imitation. Although they compose in the very different genres of prose memoir and lyric and elegiac poetry, both of these writers subscribe to the Christian tradition of creating better selves by conforming to popular models of virtue. Chapters 3 and 4 pair the scientists Benjamin Rush and David Rittenhouse with schoolgirl needlework artists. These chapters show how republicans imagined citizenship for both men and women as a process of emulation. Leading male scientists and young women at school both sought to make themselves “‘echo back’ more precisely the edicts of divine law,” whether they did so by creating mechanical imitations of the workings of the planets like Rittenhouse’s orrery or embroidered globe samplers for display in their homes (102). In these chapters, Howell also helpfully and precisely distinguishes emulation from other forms of copying. “Emulation encodes rivalry … but also imitation: it is at once the generation of distinction and the erasure of distinction” (119). Republican theories of the subject urged men and women to emulate—to become the very best at imitation. The final two chapters on Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Ormond (1799) and on Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick (1851) reflect back on the “arts of dependence” with horror (Brown) and with admiration (Melville). Brown portrays imitation and emulation as “dark forces of ceaseless, machine-like repetition” that produce stagnation, pestilence, viciousness, and death (182). Brown’s critique gestures toward the beginning of the end for republican views of individuality and culture. Melville’s work, however, reveals the persistence of the arts of dependence in the nineteenth century. Howell pulls at what initially seems like a slender thread—the single metaphor of splicing in Melville’s sprawling text—to expose a new way of understanding Moby Dick’s critique of the liberal model of American individualism.One of Howell’s great strengths as an interpreter is his ability to find fascination in the utterly conventional and to treat with empathy practices and philosophies that seem alien to modern readers. This skill is particularly evident in his account of how Wheatley’s occasional verse theorizes failure and success in terms of Christian humility. The chapter opens with an account of Thomas Jefferson’s attack on African Americans, specifically including Wheatley, as physically and intellectually “monotonous” in contrast to whites’ individuation (54). Howell presents Wheatley’s work as a robust alternative to Jefferson’s racialized notions of individuality. For Wheatley, individualism entails a problematic atomism and arrogance that merely represents “one’s distance from God” (81). She urges her readers to render themselves instead “lovely copies of the Maker’s plan” (73). Likewise, in his analysis of the “spirit of emulation” preached in female academies, Howell finds “a counterforce to the dangers of unbridled (‘masculine’ and potentially libertine) possessive individualism” (119). Thus, young women who learn legible handwriting and fine sewing by copying models also construct political subjects and selves. Imitation, far from being suicide, offers women a means of producing and sustaining the relationships and collective identities that build the nation.Against Self-Reliance offers a persuasive account of an early republican understanding of the self that is molded by imitation and dependence, but how and why this version of subjectivity loses ground to liberal individualism is less certain. In the introduction, Howell indicates that the answer to this question has to do with ideological shifts that occur in the nineteenth century. In chapter 5, Howell shows that Brown’s novel Ormond attacks republican fantasies of manufacturing people who regularly adhere to ideal models and natural laws. Yet, he resists presenting Brown as the American herald of romantic individualism. Howell argues that Brown mounts this critique without offering an alternative to the arts of dependence. The concluding chapter on Moby Dick also demonstrates that the arts of dependence have significant residual influence in the nineteenth century. Thus, Against Self-Reliance largely leaves the problem of what happens to the arts of dependence open for future studies to address. The silence on the question of “what happens?” may frustrate some readers, but it is consistent with this book’s project of bringing to light occluded versions of social and political selves and resisting liberal ideology’s power to distort our knowledge of rival forms of subjectivity.In the concluding paragraph of his analysis of female emulation, Howell points out additional avenues for investigation that this book might provoke. Citing the description of the “strong chords of sympathy between the representative and his constituent” in Federalist no. 35 (1788), Howell wonders whether the dependence that the Federalist prescribes for representatives makes it “a form of conduct manual and an argument against the uncomplicated valorizations of liberal subjectivity” akin to textbooks and samplers for women (156). What happens if we reread founding political texts as works focused on emulation rather than singularity and independence? What would such a reading reveal about the intertwining of the domestic and the political? Would it show that the first audience for these texts understood them in terms of relationships rather than in terms of autonomy and self-making? Ultimately, by presenting the early republic as a place and a time period where Americans lived in dependence, rather than independence, Against Self-Reliance calls readers to reevaluate their devotion to individualism in scholarly frameworks and in the contemporary moment. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 114, Number 1August 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/685933HistoryPublished online May 26, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
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