strange beauty: the politics of ungenre in rebecca harding davis's life in the iron mills

Strange Beauty: The Politics of Ungenre in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills

Near the middle of the first book of Little Women (1868), Jo, Meg, Laurie, and the whole crew sit down for a game of “Rig-marole.” Kate explains, “‘One person begins a story, any nonsense you like, and tells as long as they please, only taking care to stop short at some exciting point, when the next takes it up, and does the same. It’s very funny, when well done, and makes a perfect jumble of tragical comical stuff to laugh over’” (Alcott 1998, 124). They all take turns and, as they do so, employ agile knowledge of the various generic conven-tions available to nineteenth-century readers: fairy tale (“Once upon a time” [125]), romance (“A ravishing lovely lady” [125]), adventure (“Instantly Sir What’s-his-name recovered himself, pitched the tyrant out of the window, and turned to join the lady” [126)], the gothic (“A tall figure, all in white, with a veil over its face, and a lamp in its wasted hand” [126]), comedy (“Thankee,” said the knight . . . and sneezed seven times so violently that his head fell off” [126]), the sea-faring novel (“the jolly tars cheered like mad” [127]), and so on. “‘What a piece of nonsense we have made!’” exclaims Sallie (128). This piece of nonsense, though, signals Alcott’s own aptitude for manipulating liter-ary convention and, therefore, potentially her awareness of the conven-tions she herself was reinforcing when writing Little Women. It also serves to mark and upset neat taxonomies of reading and writing. Unsurprisingly, a later incarnation of Rigmarole became popular among the surrealists, who renamed the game “Exquisite Corpse” after a sentence formed when they first played it: “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau” (“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine”) (Brotchie and Gooding 1991, 143–44). In this version, phrases were

Dana Seitler

American Literature, Volume 86, Number 3, September 2014DOI 10.1215/00029831-2717398 © 2014 by Duke University Press

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Published by Duke University Press

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written down on a piece of paper, which was then folded to conceal part of the writing before being handed to the next player. Enjoyed by the likes of Jules Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, and Tristan Tzara, Exquisite Corpse (and Rigmarole before it) emphasizes the pleasure of accident and embraces the spirit of collective verbal collage. It also reg-isters the banality of literary convention and the standardization of sto-rytelling. These are games that allow players to perform their literary erudition while in turn pointing out the near-coagulation of literary form. But in producing “a perfect jumble” (Alcott 1998, 124), Rigma-role in Little Women might also be aspirational.

These days, the term aspirational is usually linked to neoliberal cor-porate speak. Aspiration in this context acts as a form of social hope based on the fantasy of individualized socioeconomic mobility. But his-torically, an aspirational narrative might be thought of as a text dissat-isfied with available conventions of expression and representation. An aspirational narrative might repeat certain conventions, but it develops its story, style, or form in such a way as to record the problems of doing so. We might think of the aspirational narrative, then, as one that, like Little Women, codifies the very genre it represents—in this case, the tradition of American sentimental fiction—but also registers the act of codification within its own terms.

Thinking about a text’s aspirations has to do with just this sort of narrative impasse: how can a text help us imagine new political and social modes of being in the world when the material and aesthetic resources to do so are all but nonexistent? Rebecca Harding Davis’s 1861 novella, Life in the Iron Mills, takes this problem as its central question. It does so by playing a game of Rigmarole. Grappling with questions of genre, reading, and writing—winding its way through romance, the gothic, sentimentality, and an inchoate realism—Iron Mills poses political questions as aesthetic ones.1 The text posits a coterminous relation between art and politics in the nineteenth cen-tury, most especially in its use of sculpture to dramatize class struggle and, indirectly, the problem of the woman writer. The text’s efforts cul-minate in its central figure: the korl woman statue carved by Hugh Wolfe in his off hours out of the waste material of the iron manufactur-ing process. The sculpture represents Wolfe’s thirst “to know beauty,” a knowledge that would allow him to become “something other than he is” (Davis [1861] 1998, 48). The explicitly feminized art object seems to quench this thirst insofar as it transforms his experience of

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deprivation into form. But the sculpture—described as “rough” and “ungainly”—in its atypical expression of the feminine simultaneously disables any easy aesthetic distance that would result in the attribution of beauty normatively defined (74). Instead, its particular nonnorma-tive form of femininity formalizes what the text attempts to call into being. At stake here is not the foregrounding of the political problem of the oppressed, subordinated subject who can use art as a form of escape, but a foregrounding of the aesthetic problem of what forms of representation exist or do not exist at any given moment that make imaginable new forms of personhood or even social change.

Aspiring/To Aspire

My thoughts about aspirational texts are intended as an experiment in thinking through the socially structured expectations of genre. If per-sonhood is always an aesthetic event—if notions of persons are played out as any variety of generic mappings and fictive scripts—how has literature participated in this event? Such exploration perhaps begins with Ernst Bloch’s work in The Spirit of Utopia (1918) and The Principle of Hope ([1938–47] 1996). In these works, Bloch argues that the intrica-cies of hope can be unearthed in even the most ideological of products (but also in various forms of music, art, and poetry), which contain emancipatory moments that project visions of a space beyond the orga-nization and structure of life under capitalism.2 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s 1995 essay on queer studies—“What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?”—understands aspiration not as immanent in the object, as does Bloch, but born of practice, and thus it demon-strates the various optimisms that buoy much queer work. They dis-cuss “queer commentary” as work that “aspires to create publics, . . . publics whose abstract spaces can also be lived in, remembered, hoped for.” But these publics are less finite social formations than imagined forms of belonging: “membership in them is more a matter of aspira-tion than it is the expression of identity or history” (Berlant and War-ner 1995, 344). The work of aspiring to a community, politics, or aes-thetic project enables a kind of dreaming forward, a vision of both a present and a future in relation to how we participate in the creative practices that can produce a world.

More recent interest within queer studies in notions of aspiration continues this line of thinking about how we might create new forms of

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collectivity and produce new forms of aesthetic analysis that don’t suc-cumb to the pressures of political pessimism and negation. José Muñoz, who weds Bloch to the lessons of queer commentary, writes, “We must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” (Muñoz 2009, 1). For Muñoz, the aim is to embrace what Bloch (1:1996, 21) called the “not-yet-here,” a practice that harnesses the stark reality of the everyday to a collective ideality, that inhabits an optimism understood not as a spe-cies of false consciousness, or misguided ambition, but as a mode of cultural critique and political resistance. The forms of critical aspira-tion evinced by Bloch, Berlant, Warner, and Muñoz alike are about sus-taining a space of inquiry—a project driven by the form of a question, and yet comfortable with those questions remaining open and some-times unanswerable.3

As Berlant and Warner’s earlier work makes clear, various invest-ments in aspirational forms have been around for a while, finding par-ticular expression in queer and feminist poststructuralist theory.4 Some of this work has concentrated on the gendered ideology of both aesthetic philosophy and dominant artistic practices, demonstrating how femininity as a metaphor has been enlisted to serve male con-cerns and desires while simultaneously stripping actual women of political agency.5 Other accounts of the aesthetic, a counterpart to the former, argue for what has come to be characterized as a “feminist aes-thetic” in which “feminine writing,” or écriture feminine, can pose a challenge to the “phallogocentrism” of culture.6

Feminist film theory, in its earliest incarnations, is instructive here. Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, and Mary Ann Doane, among others, while presenting divergent analyses of film culture, labored in solidar-ity to search for a cinema that did not enclose the female body within its masculinist scopic logic. Mulvey (1989, 16) called for “a total nega-tion of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film,” and Silver-man (1996, 81) for relentless feminist textual intervention: “It can only be through the creation and circulation of alternative images and words that [the subject] can be given access to new identificatory coor-dinates.” Such claims resonate with those of Irigaray and Cixous who, bracingly and unabashedly, called for the invagination of language. While Cixous (1976, 875) argued that “woman must write her self,” Iri-garay sought to locate the “elsewhere” of female pleasure and thus to wrest the question of the feminine away from the economy of the logos.

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Intimating an intense intimacy, Irigaray (1985a, 215) urges, “Let’s hurry and invent our own phrases.” She wasn’t the only one with this ardent desire: from Donna Haraway’s (1991, 149–181) embrace of “the promise of monsters” in feminist science fiction to Jane Gallop’s (1981) refocusing of our psychoanalytic attention on women as desiring sub-jects to Kathryn Bond Stockton’s (1994, xvi) crucial insistence that “we need to discourse upon escapes from discourse,” we can see how, along with analysis of the different genres of subjectivity that women are compelled to repeat, came an equally urgent call for new ways to imagine the relation between language and signification.

Regardless of their differences and the various accusations of essen-tialism some of them have garnered, these projects instruct us on the political necessity of engaging the aesthetic. As much as they are chal-lenged, generic conventions never go away, making their undoing an ongoing political and aesthetic necessity. The question that thus drives me here: is there a history of aesthetic refusal that can teach us ways to rethink the binding narratives of compressed personhood?7 By paying closer attention to already existing histories of aesthetic resistance, might we be able to dehistoricize—make less dominant—the stabiliz-ing force of genre and the horizon of expectation genre creates in rela-tion to various normative structures, practices, and ideas about being a person in the world? Finally, how might thinking historically about aspirational forms help us expropriate the language and logic of aspira-tion from neoliberal cooptations of it as part and parcel of capitalist subjectivity?

This process entails confronting existing understandings of nine-teenth-century “aspirational narratives” that thematize American indi-vidualism and its attendant fantasies of the acquisition of wealth and power (Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, for example). This late nineteenth-century bootstrap ideology corresponds quite readily to contemporary accounts of the neoliberal entrepreneurial subject, imagined as operating with freedom and autonomy in an inexhaustible marketplace. Aspiring to something in these contexts means attaching yourself to a set of conditions that relo-cate you within the very narrative you hoped to surpass: in this case, one of economic inequality and class difference.8 These narrative forms point to the problem whereby even hope and happiness—what we wish for and work toward—are accommodated to a capitalist enter-prise. Their entrenchment may well explain why Life in the Iron Mills

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takes the dreamscape of class mobility and capitalist industrialism as its context. However, I am trying to develop a different conversation about the aspirational, not one in which our cathexis to aspiration impedes our ability to thrive, nor one in which our potential to survive coercive contexts exists in the always receding horizon of a utopian future. I turn to late nineteenth-century questions of form and genre as a nodal moment in which aesthetic relations are in flux, and in which a number of texts usually conceived as fixed, including Little Women and Iron Mills, formally register the pressures of their aes-thetic and social constraints. Existing on the cusp of the solidification of the subsequently powerful categories of realism and naturalism, Iron Mills makes concrete some of the costs of that solidification and our reliance on these generic categories to organize understandings of late nineteenth and early nineteenth-century literature and culture. To think about a narrative that aspires toward something other than what it is means eschewing a desire for generic permanence and instead thinking about narrative as productively incompetent to the story it strives to tell.

Ungenre

Since its reprint in 1971, Life in the Iron Mills has been consistently noted for its hybrid tendencies and ultimately upheld as an anticipa-tory example of American realism. Nonetheless, because Iron Mills emerged from a mid-nineteenth-century culture of sentimental fiction, a central literary-critical debate has developed over the tensions between the novella’s realism and its sentimentality. While Sharon Harris (1991, 19) suggests that Davis should be thought of as a “meta-realist” whose work “synthesize[s] several modes (romanticism, senti-mentalism, realism),” she ultimately concedes that “realism remains [her] most explicit focus.” Jean Pfaelzer (1996, 35), on the other hand, looks closely at the function of sympathy in the novella, which “flows across class and gender lines in a transcendent motif of female subjec-tivity.” In addition to realism and sentimentality in Iron Mills, though, readers will also notice the text’s gothic tendencies, its ambivalent transcendentalism, and its recourse to religious discourse. In part, this displays Davis’s literary erudition, as was a common practice for nineteenth-century women writers, who demonstrated in print the strength and scope of their intelligence as a way to legitimize their

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authorship. It also puts into practice an active search for narrative form—for the manner of storytelling that would best serve the aims and objectives of the story.

If the novella’s primary literary modalities have sparked critical debate, there exists an equally significant discussion of its major themes. Some critics, like Pfaelzer and Harris, focus on the historical condition of women; others, such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (1997), on the disabled body (via Deb’s hunchback form). Still others, such as Amy Schrager Lang (2006) and Laura Hapke (2001), shift the conversation from gender to class, cogently arguing that class relations in the text are not simply metaphors for the struggles of the woman writer but a vital subject in themselves. Eric Schocket (2006, 46) ana-lyzes the text’s racial constructions of both class and whiteness, and Gavin Jones (2008, 36) emphasizes the material conditions of the work-ing poor on display in the story. Each of these arguments has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the novella. Taken together, they point to the extent to which Davis’s short work was pro-foundly imbricated in the political and social conditions of everyday life in the nineteenth century. It would be dismissive, then, to argue that the novella is about only one of these motifs, identity categories, or social situations, for the text has enabled useful arguments about all of them. Davis’s well-documented concern with the plight of the woman writer, her direct experience with the widening disparities of class wrought by the rise of American industrialism, her physical location in the border town of Wheeling, Virginia, as the nation teetered on the edge of civil war: all contributed to the shaping of Iron Mills.

But despite the awareness of the text’s multigeneric mode and its hybrid political issues, critics have tended to resolve its narrative sur-feits into singular defining characteristics or themes. These efforts to make the patterns of Iron Mills and texts like it readable disable other kinds of discussion about the productive incoherence of a text. Iron Mills essentially fails both politically and generically, and this failure is the point. It fails to emancipate Hugh Wolfe from his imprisonment and eventual suicide; it fails to produce an explicit aesthetic form that could reimagine an alternative future of egalitarian class, gender, and race relations. Its failure in these domains is the crisis of the narrative, staged as “the crisis of [Wolfe’s] life” (Davis 1998, 49).

Jack Halberstam’s recent work asks that we instrumentalize the energies of failure as a tool for undoing narratives of hetero-progress.

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He argues “for stupidity, failure, and forgetfulness over knowing, mastering, and remembering in terms of contemporary knowledge formations” (2011, 147). But failure in Iron Mills is just the opposite: it has a desire to make its readers know, to map the astonishing unmap-pability of impoverishment, to teach us how to be better readers by emphasizing the simultaneous necessity and inadequacy of the aes-thetic. Failing, in this sense, is not to embrace not-knowing, in Halber-stam’s sense, but it is instead offered by Davis as a new way of perceiv-ing the limits of the aesthetic. At a time just prior to when realism will come to be trumpeted as the new form of social change, and into which Iron Mills will be coopted by literary realists and critics alike, both past and present, understanding Davis’s countervailing engagement with the aesthetic changes how we think about that literary history.

We can observe Davis’s advocacy for a relentless mode of question-ing from the outset such that the form of a question propels us into its narrative space:

Is this the end?O life, as futile, then, as frail!What hope of answer or redress?

The second and third lines of the novella’s opening epigraph are from Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1849); the first line is Davis’s own. The original reads in full:

O life as futile, then, as frail! O for thy voice to soothe and bless! What hope of answer, or redress?Behind the veil, behind the veil.

Written by Tennyson after the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hal-lam, the poem meditates on the possibility of living after great loss. By cutting the second line, Davis excises its plea for personal intimacy, creating in its absence a sense of despair. While the veil returns at the end of the story in the form of a curtain partially hiding Wolfe’s now thirty-year-old sculpture from view in the narrator’s home, here the last line is also cut to deny closure to the questioning impulse of the penultimate line: “What hope of answer, or redress?” Instead, she adds her own opening line, another question: “Is this the end?” With this addition, Davis produces a visual effect by which the definitive exclam-

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atory lament (“O Life, as futile, then, as frail!”) is literally bracketed by a set of questions, thereby calling that exclamation into question. The fact that the epigraph’s first line is repeated in the novella’s closing pages indicates its significance. Displacing the affective register of Victorian misery in favor of a set of interrogatives produces a new affective arena based in inquiry. Is this the end or not? Are we simply left with the story of individual decline and personal isolation, or what? This is not a yes-or-no question. It is simply a question, one that Davis presents as its own sort of possibility. “I will tell you plainly that I have a great hope; I bring it to you to be tested. It is this: that this terrible dumb question is its own reply” (Davis 1998, 41). Inquiry becomes a social methodology, for just asking a question demands that we look at the social differently, that we see it as a question as opposed to the inev-itable expression of the present. And if a question is its own reply, then the mode of questioning the novella proposes is one that suspends that inevitability and insists that we dwell in a space of nonclarity. Genre is proleptic. Its conventions are known, its forms recognizable, its end-ings anticipated and relentlessly repeatable. The nonclarity of a ques-tion that is neither explicitly asked nor in need of an answer takes the reader in a different direction of reading.

Excising certain lines and adding others quite literally takes Tenny-son’s poem apart. Written in four-line ABBA stanzas of iambic tetram-eter, often referred to as “In Memoriam stanzas,” the original poem generates a regulated metrical pattern. Davis’s repurposed version dis-regards foot, rhyme scheme, and the standardization of the four-line stanza altogether. She deconventionalizes the poem and, in so doing, matches her mode of address—the interrogatory mode—to a more trenchant visual figuration. Question mark, exclamation point, ques-tion mark. In this moment of what I would like to call ungenre, an estab-lished pattern is placed in doubt. Cut, slashed, and appended, what is crafted out of Tennyson’s work of introspective mourning is an equivo-cal and conditional form, which is to say no form at all. This is not to argue that formlessness is a “better,” more radical aesthetic. It’s to point out that Iron Mills testifies to a historical moment in which genre presents itself as an inadequate resource. The text not only allows us to glimpse the aesthetic tensions that emerge when the limits of repre-sentation reveal themselves, it bodies forth the desire for degeneri-cized forms of expression.

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“Deeper Yet If One Could Look”

The insistence on a mode of questioning in place of a fixed formal reg-ister continues in the novella’s opening sentence: “A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron works?” (Davis 1998, 39). This resumes the interrogatory mode set up by the epigraph, and it layers that mode with a direct address to the reader, whose near total igno-rance of the culture of labor is assumed. It also disregards the rules of grammar. As described in the Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed., 2010, 326–27), the colon is most commonly used before a quotation, list, series, or explanation. Thus “A cloudy day:” should be followed by some sort of explanatory, additive, or qualifying language that helps clarify the initial utterance. The horizon of expectation of the colon, however, is here refused. In its stead: the construction of a witless reader. We have been propelled into a space in which our own vision is configured as impaired. The fact that the colon is followed neither by a list nor an explanation but a direct, unforgiving question suggests that it is precisely because our vision is impaired that we lack the ability to understand fully what “a cloudy day” might mean. Even the explana-tion that finally does come in the next sentence, “The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable,” is undermined by the narrator’s own admission of visual difficulty: “I . . . can scarcely see through the rain” (Davis 1998, 39). What we are told is also topsy-turvy, with the sky sinking at dawn, just when the sun should be rising. We are pre-sented with a nature reordered by the effects of industry. The clouds are indistinguishable from the smoke produced by the iron mills; industry has made visual clarity impossible: “The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke” (39); “smoke everywhere!”; “can you see how foggy the day is?” (40). We may be able to see the smoke and the fog, but not beyond or through it, and so the novella stages its entire raison d’être as enabling us to do so. But it also flatly refuses this objective. “I want to make it a real thing to you,” the narrator promises, but simultane-ously declares, “I will only tell my story,” “I dare make my meaning no clearer” (41). The narrator will tell us the story, but will not interpret it for us. The implication is that we need to become better readers on our own, to stop relying on the scripts that make suffering more palatable, a task we can accomplish only if our “eyes are free . . . to look deeper” (41). This is precisely why I have chosen to linger on the meaning of the text’s inaugural punctuation: exclamation points undermined by

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questions marks, the colon’s promise of clarification denied. It is as if we need to bring the page closer to our faces, to look at its crevices and pores more deeply, in order to become more intimate, which is to say more close, readers.

This argument is pressed further when we meet Wolfe’s cousin Deb-orah, a picker in the cotton mills. On the surface, Deb possesses a “thwarted woman’s form,” lives in “a waking stupor,” and is thus “fit to be a type of her class” (Davis 1998, 46). Yet, “if one looked deeper into the heart of things,” a different conclusion could be reached: “Deeper yet if one could look, was there nothing worth reading in this wet, faded thing? If anything were hidden beneath the pale, bleared eyes . . . no one had ever taken the trouble to read its faint signs” (46, italics mine). In the depiction of Deb, the narrator asks us not only to remember the damage done to workers’ bodies by industrial capitalism, but to disag-gregate this damage from existing class typologies, to “read” Deb not as a transparent sign of her own impoverishment but as a sign of the middle-class failure to read in any way other than our dilatory habits of careless interpretation allow. Wai Chee Dimock (1994, 95) discusses how this description of Deb denotes “the impossibility of an identity.” On the one hand, Deb’s body registers the deformations wrought by industrial capitalism; on the other, she signifies a disjunction between body and type as she exceeds the determinations of class that should contain her. For Dimock, then, Deb’s body “refuses to be a transcript of her material conditions” (95). Schocket (2006, 36) responds to Deb in similar ways by suggesting that her true character resides “in that unmarked space as yet unread through her thoroughly marked body.” Both analyses locate the way the narrator’s characterization of Deb underscores her explanatory limits, but neither accounts for the para-graph’s didactic mode—its exhortation to read for depth. Like the ear-lier call to “come right down with me,” here we are asked to plunge into Deb’s inner being in order to get past the taxonomic impulses of class difference (Davis 1998, 41). As a metaphor it problematically corre-sponds to the idea of class as a ladder, placing the working poor at the bottom, and thus subscribes to the same fantasy of upward mobility that is ultimately Hugh’s downfall. But the description of Deb also operates aesthetically, insisting on a way of reading that would pro-duce something other than the typologies of personhood current in the nineteenth-century United States. How we read, the kind of read-ers we are, our very relation to the aesthetic is at stake. The novella’s

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impetus is the forging of an aesthetic theory—its wish, that is, to recon-ceive the process through which we perceive the world.

“Hideous, Fantastic, and Strangely Beautiful”

“I can paint nothing of this,” the narrator insists (Davis 1998, 47). The narrator is impelled to tell the story but does not have the means to do so; or, more specifically, refuses to revert to an aesthetic that would render Hugh’s plight according to the conventions of administered cul-ture. The decision is not a matter of taste but rather an awareness of how the aesthetics of industrial, corporate capitalism generate a visi-ble class structure. Hugh Wolfe experiences this structure as an insu-perable division when he walks into a church and listens to the Chris-tian minister preaching: “He painted the incarnate Life, Love, the universal Man” (64; emphasis mine). These were “beautiful words” but “toned to suit another class of culture” (64). The minister’s words are an aesthetic failure because he paints a picture of beauty that ulti-mately serves the interests of class division even as it masquerades as universal truth.

The inaccuracies and inadequacies of representation are no less daunting when Deb takes a walk to the mills to bring Hugh dinner. “Perhaps if she had possessed an artist’s eye, the picturesque oddity of the scene might have made her step stagger less, and the path seem shorter; but to her the mills were only ‘summat devlish to look at by night’” (Davis 1998, 45). One way to read this characterization is as a lament. If only Deb could see artistically, perhaps she would be buoyed by the soothing fantasies that aesthetics have the power to provide—in this case, by the ideology of the “picturesque,” which, in its nineteenth-century landscape form, sought to stage an uncorrupted nature in the face of burgeoning industrialism. Or, maybe, an “artist’s eye” would allow her to see the alteration of this fantasy—its picturesque oddity—as the smoke-laden landscape is obliterated by the rise of the mills in the distance. Another way to read it, though, is as a critique of aestheti-cism. An artist’s eye, on this reading, would gloss over the reality of the mills, producing them in picturesque terms, and thus enable a false, if momentarily comforting, vision of the structures of labor. By experi-encing the mills as a “picturesque oddity,” Deb could transform a site of exploitation into a scene of novelty—much like the upper-class visitors she will later encounter do. Their visit to the mills continues to signal

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this point, for they are there on a tour of sorts, much akin to the tours of poor districts that were a regular feature in cities like New York. Deb, however, is seemingly incapable of this vision, seeing, instead, the fac-tory before her as a species of gothic affliction—“something devilish.” Here the artistic enterprise is presented as an exploitative activity—a picturesque aestheticization of suffering that would reduce the lives of the working poor to occasions for aesthetic pleasure. To “see” accord-ing to this strategy would mean performing an imaginative reconstruc-tion of—and therefore an aesthetic justification for—the site of alien-ated labor.

The reference to the picturesque corresponds, historically, to the popularity of the romanticization of the poor in picturesque narratives and the craze of scenic tourism that first emerged in eighteenth-cen-tury England—the poetic fascination with the Lake District, for exam-ple, and the reinvigorated tradition of landscape painting (see Berm-ingham 1986 and Conron 2000). In the United States, landscape painting, popularly represented by the Hudson River school, occupied center stage in American art from the 1830s through the 1860s. Paint-ers such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and Albert Bier-stadt painted large-scale canvasses depicting idealized landscapes. Their paintings of Niagara Falls, Mount Holyoke, Connecticut, and the Catskills inspired leisure tours to these locations so that the middle classes could experience an uncorrupted, untamed wilderness for themselves (see Driscoll 1997 and Silver 2003). The popularity of the picturesque movement was, in large part, due to the fact that it pro-duced an increasingly fragile landscape in palpable terms—making unspoiled nature a thing of value as it became more and more inacces-sible. But this is precisely what is in question in the novella—what forms can adequately accommodate the pressures and realities of a given moment? The text’s brief reference to the picturesque calls upon, in order to critique, a well-established and overwhelmingly popular tra-dition whose mission is represented as one that romanticizes a world no longer possible in the face of mass industry. This goes a long way in explaining the uneasy tension in the novella between a transcenden-talist embrace of nature and industry’s dehumanization of bodies. On the one hand, nature becomes Deb’s salvation. Rescued by a Quaker woman and taken out to the country, “long years of sunshine and fresh air . . . make healthy and hopeful [her] impure body” (Davis 1998, 73). But this transcendentalist vision does not sit easy in the novel—“its

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dream of green fields . . . almost worn out” (40). The implication is that when a philosophy, like transcendentalism, is transformed into an aes-thetic, like the picturesque, all too often the ambition is to idealize and unify, which ultimately denies a vision of the dissolution of ways of life that marks the second half of the nineteenth century.

The problem of the aesthetic is historical and specific: the failure of art (in the instance of the picturesque, but also in the practices of bour-geois reading the narrator scolds us for) isn’t innate to aesthetic prac-tice; it is a consequence of aesthetic norms that congeal at particular moments in time and constrain meaning according to their various conventions. As a set of familiar structuralist networks, literary genres and artistic styles organize a vision of the world, and, in their sedi-mented form, work to shape both cognition and affect, proffering a neat package of received ideas about how to think and feel. Thus Jacques Rancière argues that aesthetics are not only constituted by a historically given situation of mediation and representation; they work to establish how a thing can be represented in the first place. Aesthet-ics determine (and are determined by) what Rancière (2004, 12) calls “the distribution of the sensible”—the manner by which a person, object, or practice can be thought. When Rancière writes that the aes-thetic “simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience,” he means that artistic form “revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time” (13). On this view, aesthetics belong to a complex of sensibility that carves out places and forms of thought, and it does so by bringing into being the modes of perception through which these places and forms can be understood. Aesthetics forge and shift the fab-ric of the sensible—of what the senses have the capacity to apprehend and what people have the capacity to imagine and do (63). While Bloch encourages us to look for the emancipatory content of cultural objects (rather than the merely ideological and mystificatory), Rancière reminds us of the inevitable relation between the arts and the rest of social activity, the inevitable relations that, together, distribute value and give hierarchy, that govern, that both materially and conceptually establish their politics. This understanding of aesthetic activity lays bare its relation with the conditions of the present—the linkages of politics and perception.

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In Iron Mills, this understanding unfolds in the form of Hugh Wolfe’s sculpture of the korl woman. When the gathering of upper- and middle-class men touring the mills encounters the sculpture, they find them-selves in a state of perplexed aesthetic contemplation. Discovering the sculpture in the rainy darkness, they are startled: “a woman, white, of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture of warning” (Davis 1998, 52). After they ascertain that she is not “alive,” they take a closer look:

There was not one line of beauty or grace in it: a nude woman’s form, muscular, grown coarse with labor, the powerful limbs instinct with some one poignant longing. One idea: there it was in the tense, rigid muscles, the clutching hands, the wild, eager face, like that of a starv-ing wolf’s. (53)

None of her interpreters are capable of grasping her significance. Mitchell, the most sympathetic of the lot, sums up their affective confu-sion: “The figure touched him strangely,” and Dr. May, their cognitive disturbance: “I cannot catch the meaning” (53). Nor are they satisfied by Hugh’s own explanation: “She be hungry” (53). “Oh-h! But what a mistake you have made, my fine fellow!” comes Dr. May’s patronizing response. “You have given no sign of starvation to the body” (53). May’s scientific positivism renders him incapable of reading either figura-tively or politically. We are left with Mitchell, who Hugh feels “saw the soul of the thing” (54). But Hugh is both right and wrong. Mitchell turns to May in anger: “Are you blind? Look at that woman’s face! It asks ques-tions of God, and says ‘I have a right to know’” (54). Invoking the visual economy of blindness as a critique of normative aesthetic apprehen-sion, Mitchell intuits that the sculpture is, like the novella as whole, a question mark. As we learn in the novella’s closing pages, the epigraph’s inaugural question indeed belongs to the sculpture: “Its pale, vague lips seem to tremble with a terrible question. ‘Is this the End?’ they say,—‘nothing beyond?’” (74). What Mitchell fails to see, though, is how this question, like the interrogatory narrative mode as a whole, is a critique of his own ways of seeing. Mitchell is a dilettante, “a man who sucked the essence out of science or philosophy in an indifferent, gentlemanly way; who took Kant, Novalis, Humboldt, for what they were worth” (51). And so, while he discerns both Hugh’s artistic talent and the greater political meaning of his sculpture, he is moved to do

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nothing, accustomed as he is to collecting and studying. Instead, he views Hugh as another source for aesthetic pleasure: “He looked at the furnace-tender as he had looked at a rare mosaic in the morning” (55). Dr. May ultimately has the last word in his summation of the sculp-ture’s meaning: “A working-woman,—the very type of her class” (53). Of course, we have seen this exact expression before, in the descrip-tion of Deb that the narrator offers up as a false account of her person-hood, one that would accept social class as a putatively immanent cat-egory of being.

As a question with no answer, then, the korl woman remains nonnar-ratable, her political meaning aesthetically sublimated into her incho-ate wildness and indefinable hunger. None of the regulatory fictions of gender, available contemplative aesthetic stances, or preexisting crite-ria serve the men in their attempts to confront the korl woman’s over-whelming stature: “There was not one line of beauty or grace in it” (Davis 1998, 53). There is, in other words, nothing akin to what Edmund Burke described in his 1757 treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful as the beautiful. For Burke, the beautiful comprises everything the korl woman is not: small-ness, smoothness, and delicacy. “Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the ease and insensible swell; the variety of the surface . . . through which the unsteady eye slides gid-dily” (Burke 1990, 105). Burke employs the feminine form as the medi-ating link between aesthetic pleasure and sexual desire and, in so doing, establishes a gendered standard for the experience of the beauti-ful that continued to be popular well into the nineteenth century. In the bafflement of the male spectators at the mill—their inability to square the naked woman’s form before them with the normative, gendered, and sexualized aesthetic claims to which they subscribe—we see Davis playing with these Burkean notions of feminized aesthetics. But the ref-erence here is to Kant, whom Mitchell reads “in an indifferent, gentle-manly way” (Davis 1998, 51). For Kant, the beautiful is not an attribute of the object, as it was for Burke, but attributed to the object by the sub-ject in a state of complete disinterestedness. This assumed pose of detachment allowed Kant ([1790] 2005) to portray the aesthetic as a spontaneous sense-activity and thus a space through which the indi-vidual experiences his or her own capacity for freedom in the world, a freedom that, in turn, enables a “sensus communis” or community of

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taste united by individual consent. Davis, by positioning the ultimately ineffectual and self-absorbed Mitchell as a reader of Kant, responds to this philosophy in the negative. Indeed, in Iron Mills, Kant’s affirmation of individual spectatorial sovereignty in the act of aesthetic contempla-tion that would then figure as a universal, democratizing truth is thrown out as a possible means of unification across class and gender lines. Not only do the various standpoints of the spectators (Mitchell’s intellec-tual tourism, May’s medical literalism, Kirby and the owner’s son’s apa-thetic greed) reveal Kantian disinterestedness as an impossibility, when paired with the other authors Mitchell also enjoys—romantic poet Novalis, who championed the idea of a universal poesy, and Ger-man naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose five-volume work, Kos-mos (1845–47), attempted to unify the various branches of scientific knowledge—he is read as part of a categorical impulse that serves to contain and delimit human and social life. This is not to argue or agree that Kant, Novalis, and Humboldt—as representatives for aesthetics, the romantic tradition, and science—are part of a hegemonic social order attempting to codify and manage art, life, and language at its core (or to suggest they aren’t), but to point out that Iron Mills treats them as such as a means to put pressure on existing forms of knowledge that would discipline, and place in purposive constraint, the korl woman’s irreducible difference.9 The men can see the sculpture, but they cannot understand it—as a result, it seems, of their aesthetic education.

The korl woman thus exists as a challenge to prescribed forms for experiencing art. From her we begin to glimpse something, an aes-thetic not yet capable of being recognized or even registered by the existing conceptual or political order: a shift, or rupture, in the distri-bution of the sensible. Hugh Wolfe’s sculptures, described as “hideous, fantastic, and strangely beautiful” (Davis 1998, 48), forge a different kind of beautiful; they cause stress fractures in the formal conventions of the seeable and the sayable. Refusing narration, or clarification, of the problem—existing only as a persistent question—the korl woman sculpture recomposes the landscape of representability: the relations of doing, making, seeing, and saying.

Sculptures and Sculptresses

Because the korl woman sculpture places beauty and its normative defining qualities in suspension, and because we can now see it as a

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counterformation to the practice of the picturesque—inserting a rough, ungainly woman’s body into the ideal landscape of romantic, transcen-dentalist fantasy—it is worthwhile to look at sculpture and its role in the nineteenth-century art world. With the discovery of Venus de Milo in 1820 came a renewed fascination with classical sculpture (and per-haps also an affirmation of the association between the aesthetic and classical femininity) (see Kousser 2005). The recovery of the Venus was only one of many nineteenth-century discoveries of classical mar-bles and bronzes that informed a growing interest in neoclassical sculp-ture in the United States and helped to constitute the early nineteenth-century dominant style (see Lynes 1970 and Craven 1984). Hiram Powers, Horatio Greenough, William Whetmore Story, and many oth-ers traveled to Rome and Florence to set up studios and immerse them-selves in the Italian style. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James visited these studios, befriended the sculptors, and wrote novels and stories featuring sculpture as their main element—famously Haw-thorne’s novel The Marble Faun (1860) and James’s short stories “Adina” (1879) and “The Last of the Valerii” (1874). By mid-century the artist’s studios became major tourist attractions as Americans in Europe visited them as part of their grand tour (see Kasson 1990, 18; and Nelson 2007).

The increasing popularity of neoclassical sculpture sets the back-drop for Iron Mills. In the same scene at the church in which the minis-ter’s words fail Hugh, the narrator describes his surroundings with a significant amount of aesthetic detail: It was a “somber Gothic pile” filled with “still, marble figures” “built to meet the requirements and sympathies of a far other class than Wolfe’s” (Davis 1998, 64). The description of the quiescent sculptures lining the walls of the church in comparison to the korl woman’s intense vitality—made not of marble in the neoclassical tradition but from the waste or “slag” of the industrial process—is particularly telling. It not only foregrounds the inadequacy of past aesthetic styles to present social and economic conditions, it also positions Wolfe’s sculptural creations as a new aesthetic that grounds itself, quite literally, in the textures of material culture, transforming the stuff of exploitation and mass industry into a new kind of art.

Equally important for our understanding of Iron Mills is the fact that the majority of American male sculptors in the nineteenth century came to the practice through an artisan tradition (stone cutting, wood carving, etc.) and eventually moved on to the “high art” of sculpture

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through a system of patronage. Wealthy backers newly interested in the arts and the cultural capital it would garner them funded the work of Powers, Chauncey Ives, William Henry Rhinehart, and others, pay-ing for their travels to Italy and setting them up in studios there. Access to a career in the arts was, therefore, a distinct possibility, but only if one could connect with a financial benefactor, a fact of which Davis seems well aware. At a crucial moment in Iron Mills, Wolfe turns to Dr. May and asks, “‘Will you help me?’” May’s reply is swift and final: “‘I have not the means’” (Davis 1998, 56). Mitchell refuses patronage on ostensibly political grounds: “Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people’s has worked down” (57). Mitchell is seemingly channeling Marx, or perhaps the protosocialist St. Simon cited in an earlier passage (57), and the idea that social change must be brought about by the organized revolutionary actions of the laboring classes. Hugh intuits as much himself when, tearing his “filthy red shirt” from his body, he imagines himself a leader of social revolution, “able to speak, to know what was best, to raise these men and women working at his side up with him” (59). But any hope of change arising from patronage is dashed as, one by one, the onlookers deny him. Their dismissal of Hugh demonstrates the nondifference between extreme capitalist apathy and the middle class’s paltry efforts at reform—based in sympathy as opposed to action. It also refuses patronage as a model for social progress, perhaps momentarily siding with Mitchell’s Marx-ian sentiments and the idea of the working class as the subject of his-tory (and thus the agent of revolutionary social change). At the very least, it acknowledges the failure of a system of patronage in the arts as but another form of bootstrap capitalism.

But, because the korl woman exists as a foil to the inheritance of eighteenth-century aesthetic notions that linked the beautiful with normative femininity, she helps to coordinate questions of class strug-gle and economic injustice with questions of gender inequality. Per-haps of equal if not greater importance to the novella, then, are the sculptural works of nineteenth-century women artists. The women sculptors—Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, Ann Whitney, Emma Stebbins, Louisa Landers, and others—were referred to condescend-ingly by Henry James as “The White Marmorean Flock” in his 1903 biography of male sculptor W. W. Story, and by Story himself as a “Harem Scarem” (see Roos 1983). Like their male counterparts, they also traveled and set up studios in Rome, which afforded them both

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aesthetic and sexual freedoms outside of the traditions of heterosexual marriage. Hosmer lived there with her long-time girlfriend, Lady Ash-burton; Emma Stebbins, with famed actress Charlotte Cushman; and Louisa Landers, with a man out of wedlock. Edmonia Lewis, the first African American sculptor to achieve national prominence, produced “Forever Free” (1867) during her time there, depicting a slave break-ing free from her bonds.

Questions of sexual propriety affected both the female and male sculptors; for women, disapproval tended to be expressed in terms of their personal behavior; for the men, in public attitudes toward their work. An exemplary case is that of Hiram Powers, who, after settling into his studio in 1837, went on to make his masterpiece “Greek Slave” (1844), one of the best-known US sculptures of the time. Displaying a Greek woman captured by invading Turks during the Greek Revolu-tion, the sculpture is a life-size, entirely nude figure of a woman in chains looking demurely to her left and with her hand strategically placed to cover her vaginal area.10 Powers was prepared for any contro-versy that might arise as a result of the sculpture’s nudity not only because of his familiarity with nineteenth-century American prudery, but also as a result of the scandal caused by Horatio Greenough’s ear-lier work “The Chanting Cherubs,” commissioned in 1829 by James Fenimore Cooper while he and Greenough were in Florence (it fea-tured two cherubs in full-frontal nudity). The custom for the touring works was to produce exhibition pamphlets and guidebooks that would instruct audiences how to look at the exhibited artwork. Accordingly, Powers sent along texts to accompany the American tour of “Greek Slave” to assure audiences of the figure’s sexual modesty, explaining that her sideways glance signified a Christian resignation to her fate as a slave, thus protecting himself against charges of sexual immorality.

Shortly after Powers’s tour, and partially in response to the popular-ity of “Greek Slave,” Hosmer put on display her own masterpiece, one year prior to the writing of Iron Mills: “Zenobia in Chains” (1859).11 Both queen and captive, Hosmer’s “Zenobia” was exhibited in New York, Boston, and Chicago to over thirty thousand viewers. Compared to “Greek Slave,” “Zenobia” has more heft, is more butch than femme, and—significantly—is heavily robed. Perhaps Hosmer was abiding by the dictates of American sexual mores and the lessons learned from the likes of Greenough and Powers, but perhaps she was also refusing the more common depictions in neoclassical sculpture of feminine vul-

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nerability that nudity also represented, erecting, in its stead, a power-ful female image that refuses the male erotic gaze that “Greek Slave” seems to invite. Predictably, “Zenobia” proved less popular than “Greek Slave,” and many of the usual scripts for dismissing women’s art were in play. Nonetheless, through Hosmer’s work and that of the other women sculptors, we can hear the rumblings of a shifting terrain in the field of nineteenth-century aesthetics of which Davis was assur-edly a part. Indeed, the history of Hosmer and Powers is one of con-tested aesthetic terrain—how we look, what is available to be looked at (or read), what gets made.

I have taken a bit of time to work through this history of nineteenth-century sculpture to suggest that it exists in palimpsestic relation to the korl woman in the novella. When you scratch the surface of the korl woman, this thick history of gender, sexuality, and the politics of aesthetics is revealed. The korl woman’s purposeful coarseness and unabashed nudity respond to the “sculpture debates” quite readily, figuring forth a newly textured form of personhood: not smooth, but rough, not marble, but slag, hands not covering her naked fugure, but flung out, revealing it. Attending to this history also underscores how sculptural genre at this moment was in flux. Questions about the form nineteenth-century sculpture should take and the attitudes of recep-tion its audiences should assume were all under construction and, in some cases, contestation. Life in the Iron Mills, in other words, deliber-ately engages a medium that is undergoing its own debate about con-ventions of representation. If art is charged with the organization of reality into meaningful formations, the purpose of the korl woman sculpture is not to inspire aesthetic pleasure, but to question its founda-tions. Her strange beauty demands that the aesthetic include some-thing like ferocity, like urgent need, like naked desire without a defin-able object to attach itself to, like a question mark. This aesthetic doesn’t produce a sense of freedom and moral capacity in the viewer, à la Kant, nor should it. It pushes us into an arena in which prescribed forms of perception fail to perceive.

Subjunctivity

Life in the Iron Mills, in its feeling around for available models of repre-sentation, suggests an understanding for how the political inheres within aesthetic expression. Its inchoate articulations of economic

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injustice, class struggle, and gender politics are all wrapped up in ques-tions of imaginable form. Wolfe’s “fierce thirst for beauty,—to know it, to create it; to be—something, he knows not what, other than he is” (Davis 1998, 48) is a desire to think beyond the thinkable. His desire to create art is seamlessly linked to his desire to reconstitute his person-hood outside of the world as it has presented itself to him. But what are the conditions for doing so?12 Once again, Iron Mills presents us with no answers. Yet there are moments, emphasized throughout the novella, in which the crisis of the unthinkable might be its own resource. In yet another direct address to the reader, the narrator asks: “Do you remember rare moments when a sudden light flashed over yourself” and you could “see your life as it might have been?” (58). In these moments, you are, like Wolfe, inhabiting the space of your pos-sible self, a fantasy of a life narrative that has never come to pass. And so Wolfe, himself, often has “a clear, projected figure of himself, as he might become” (59). Might have been. Might become. The affective and grammatical mood of Hugh’s desire is subjunctive. The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.) describes the subjunctive as “a mood the forms of which are employed to denote an action or a state as conceived (and not as a fact) and therefore used to express a wish, command, exhorta-tion, or a contingent, hypothetical, or prospective event.” In Iron Mills, Hugh Wolfe laments not what didn’t happen in the past, but whatever might have been in some counterfactual future. At the end of the novel, languishing in prison, “the sudden picture of what might have been” compared to “now” (Davis 1998, 68) leaves him dejected and suicidal. The verb tense changes as well: “Let it be!” (68), he decides, right before killing himself. Using a sharpened piece of tin, the same he had formerly employed to make his sculptures, he merges with his strange, beautiful creations: we are left with the “stillness” of his “dead figure” (71). He has transformed himself into one of his own works of art, a figuration of stilled pain, a still life. Yet, the repeated use of the sub-junctive in the text, whenever Wolfe engages a moment of wishful thinking, does not characterize such thinking as delusional. The sub-junctive is the mood used to express various states of unreality; it is a formal aspect of the narrative’s search for form. When Wolfe trades in the subjunctive mode for the simple present tense (Let it be!), he ceases to live because living in the text is equated with one’s ability to inhabit the possible. The exclamation point replaces the question mark. But the subjunctive mood returns in the novella’s closing pages,

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when the korl woman sculpture reemerges from behind the curtains, an “unfinished work,” reminding us of “the promise of the Dawn” (74). A bit clichéd, especially to the extent that Davis’s religiosity repeats the familiar terrain of nineteenth-century sentimentality, but these last words are also an exhortation for a prospective aesthetic event.

Irresolution

Thus far, I have been waxing utopian about Life in the Iron Mills. But it is a flawed text for many reasons: its evocation of race contains a simul-taneous desire to acknowledge the context of slavery and a refusal to directly engage it; its account of poverty and class difference remains uneven—at times understanding them as effects of the socioeconomic situation, at others, as determining forces of character. This is not a model text. But it does help locate a historical moment in which the conventions and categorical imperatives of the social world are put into question. Reading in this way for “ungenric” moments enables a valua-tion of a text for everything it is not. If genre is something that allows us to know before knowing—if it functions as a space for the accumula-tion of knowledge about a set of literary and social norms that not only undergird the reading and writing of literature, but also the various scripts that help us to live out the fictions of our personhood—then instances of ungenre and their history might be one way to reconsider our relation to both the literary and the social.

Iron Mills contains an impulse to move beyond itself. Its aesthetics of the possible open up a space for creative imagining that resists the repetition of the same. And so, in the end, we are left with another art-ist, not Hugh Wolfe but the narrator herself, who is not only the writer of this story, but also a sculptor. We find her in her studio where she has collected Hugh’s sculpture of the korl woman, writing and think-ing about how she will finish her own sculpture seemingly in the neo-classical style: “a half-moulded child’s head, Aphrodite, a bough of for-est leaves” (Davis 1998, 74). She is, it seems, on the brink of repeating an aesthetic tradition. But the crucial aspect of this passage is its theme of unfinishedness—the narrator’s own unfinished work rhyming with the persistent presence of the korl woman sculpture and its “unfin-ished” state—perhaps what we could call the novella’s unfinished phi-losophy (74). This is, in fact, one way to define aspiration: a state of sus-pension even more than a perpetual, future-oriented movement insofar

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as its vision is always something other than, in transitional relation to, the material realities and cultural conditions of the present, but also not yet, and perhaps never, future. If what we want as readers or literary critics is a resolution to the problems Davis presents—if even in the form of a new generic or literary mode (like realism) that could better lend itself to the shaping of social critique—Iron Mills does not offer it. But this does not necessarily indicate an unsurpassable dilemma, for Iron Mills’s refusal to resolve and cohere signals Davis’s main point: that the question is its own answer.13 The interrogatory and subjunctive mode finds critical inquiry and the “might be’s” of imaginative thinking to be essential to the creation of alternative aesthetic models. The text’s inability to project how anything might ever be changed as a result does not also mean it only reproduces its determining conditions. It suggests we might need to spend more time with the crisis of represen-tation. This is not a call for politically engaged art, but an argument for the unfinished project of the politics of aesthetics. The subjunctive mood thus marks its own moment—not a projection into and wish for the future, but a mark of the present’s incapacity. By recognizing what is not there, literary works like Iron Mills give form to the predicament of aesthetic and actual impoverishment—a vision of a politics born of the strange beauty and unfinished ungenres of storytelling.

University of Toronto

Notes

1 On the aesthetics of late nineteenth-century US political discourse, see Russ Castronovo (2007).

2 We can hear echoes of Bloch in Fredric Jameson (2005, 1981). 3 Also see the equally important argument in Michael Snediker (2008). 4 I am deliberately not reiterating the alleged antisocial vs. reparative divi-

sion in queer theory, and am instead attempting to produce a kind of genealogy of anti-neoliberalist aspirational thinking.

5 See especially Naomi Schor (1987), Barbara Freeman (1997), and Caro-lyn Korsmeyer (2004).

6 See Julia Kristeva (1984), Luce Irigaray (1985a, 1985b), and Hélène Cix-ous (1981, 1976).

7 Think, here, of Peter Coviello’s (2013, 206) excellent argument on behalf of a historiographic practice “of enlargement, of accretion and expansion.”

8 See Lauren Berlant (2011), who asks us to pause to think through some of our aspirational attachments to “the good life” and ask why we have them, considering in particular the damage or derailment these attachments may cause.

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9 Elsewhere, I have argued for a rereading of Kant against the grain of his liberal rationalist tendencies (see Seitler 2014).

10 I call this convention vagina hand, and it is particularly significant in com-parison to the korl woman’s arms pointedly described as “flung out” (Davis 1998, 52) to reveal her nude form.

11 Zenobia ruled in Syria beginning in 267 AD and was defeated by Roman Emperor Aurelian. Captured by the Romans, she was brought back to Rome and forced to march in chains through the streets of the city. Of course, Zenobia is also the name of Hawthorne’s ill-fated new woman character in his satire Blithedale Romance.

12 This is precisely Foucault’s question in “The Art of Telling the Truth.” See Foucault (1994, 139–48).

13 As Robyn Weigman (2012, 301) argues, “the incapacity of the present propels the political desire that both founds and characterizes critical commitment.”

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American Literature


American Literature


strange beauty: the politics of ungenre in rebecca harding davis's life in the iron mills

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