The Body of Property

Antebellum American Fiction and the Phenomenology of Possession

Chad Luck

• Publisher: American Literatures Initiative
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780823267460, 9780823263004
• eBook ISBN: 9780823263011
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Legal History
• Index: Literature

What does it mean to own something? How does a thing become mine? Liberal philosophy since John Locke has championed the salutary effects of private property but has avoided the more difficult questions of property's ontology. Chad Luck argues that antebellum American literature is obsessed with precisely these questions.Reading slave narratives, gothic romances, city-mystery novels, and a range of other property narratives, Luck unearths a wide-ranging literary effort to understand the nature of ownership, the phenomenology of possession. In these antebellum texts, ownership is not an abstract legal form but a lived relation, a dynamic of embodiment emerging within specific cultural spaces—a disputed frontier, a city agitated by class conflict.Luck challenges accounts that map property practice along a trajectory of abstraction and "virtualization." The book also reorients recent Americanist work in emotion and affect by detailing a broader phenomenology of ownership, one extending beyond emotion to such sensory experiences as touch, taste, and vision. This productive blend of phenomenology and history uncovers deep-seated anxieties—and enthusiasms—about property across antebellum culture.

1. Walking the Property: Ownership, Space, and the Body in Motion in Edgar Huntly

In April 1799, four months before the first volume of Edgar Huntly was published in Philadelphia, a short preview of the novel appeared in the New York periodical, The Monthly Magazine and American Review. This “Fragment,” as it was called, consisted of about four chapters taken from the middle of the finished book. In order to introduce the fragment, the editor of the magazine saw fit to include a brief two-paragraph letter, ostensibly written by Edgar Huntly himself:

Mr. Editor,

The following narrative is extracted from the memoirs of a young man who resided some years since on the upper branches of the Delaware. These memoirs will shortly be published; but, meanwhile, the incidents here related are of such a kind as may interest and amuse some of your readers. Similar events have frequently happened on the Indian borders; but, perhaps, they never were before described with equal minuteness.

As to the truth of these incidents, men acquainted with the perils of an Indian war must be allowed to judge. Those who have ranged along the foot of the Blue-ridge, from Wind-gap to the Water-gap, will see the exactness of the local descriptions. It may also be mentioned that “Old Deb” is a portrait faithfully drawn from nature.¹

The letter is signed “E. H.,” but of course it is the handiwork of Charles Brockden Brown, himself the author of the novel and editor of the magazine. As such, the piece initially seems to function as little more than a fairly standard bit of self-promotion. Upon closer scrutiny, however, the letter reveals a conspicuous preoccupation with geography, both physical and political. The narrative, we learn, will take place “on the upper branches of the Delaware,” more specifically, in the area between the Wind-Gap and the Water-Gap on the eastern side of the Blue Mountains. The events of the narrative will be those “frequently” associated with “Indian borders.” And the “perils of an Indian war,” it seems, will be closely linked to boundary issues and to local topography. Nor will these topics be engaged in abstract terms. Brown is careful to emphasize the “minuteness” and “exactness” of his descriptions. In doing so, he implies that the novel will be best understood by placing it in a very particular geographical and historical context. It is not simply “the frontier” that interests Brown, but the zone of contact between whites and Indians in eastern Pennsylvania, between the Delaware river and the Blue Mountains.²

This region is particularly significant to a novel about “Indian borders” because it comprises the heart of the infamous Walking Purchase of 1737. One of the most flagrant abuses of Indian land claims in American history, the Purchase involved the defrauding and dispossession of the Delaware tribe at the hands of John and Thomas Penn (sons of William). Having produced an old Indian land deed of decidedly dubious authenticity, the two brothers demanded to take possession of their “ancient” claim. The Delaware were railroaded into ratifying the deed, which asserted that the amount of property in question would be determined by the distance a man could walk in a day and a half from a particular starting place. When it came time to actually walk the walk, the Indians were outraged to find that the Penn brothers had pre-marked the trail and that they had hired three trained athletes to do the walking. Nevertheless, the walk took place (sixty-four miles were covered), a very liberal interpretation of the boundaries was made, and the Delaware were summarily dispossessed of 750,000 acres. Crucially, the path that the walkers followed crossed the Blue Mountains precisely in the area laid out by Brown’s two-paragraph preface.³

As a number of critics have argued, the connection between Edgar Huntly and the history of the Walking Purchase is vitally important because it helps illuminate Brown’s racial and political sensibilities while at the same time fleshing out early national accounts of the Indian.⁴ What I would like to suggest, however, is that the Walking Purchase also appealed to Brown because it raised questions, specifically philosophical questions, about the nature of private property, about the process of boundary formation, and about the organization of lived space. What does it mean to own something? How do we distinguish our spaces from those of other people? How does space itself come into being? These questions, I believe, constitute a central concern of the novel in their own right, and they also directly influence our understanding of Brown’s politics. The philosophical register of Edgar Huntly makes clear the ways in which Brown was engaging Enlightenment luminaries like Locke and Hume in order to wrestle with the questions posed by the Walking Purchase. In effect, the novel yokes more abstract investigations of boundary, property, and space to the particular circumstances of late eighteenth-century Pennsylvania.

Brown himself spoke to the possibilities of a philosophically self-aware literature in an essay he wrote for The Monthly Magazine. In August 1799, the same month that the first volume of Edgar Huntly appeared, Brown published “Walstein’s School of History,” an odd, ruminative piece in which he describes the philosophical and aesthetic tenets of a fictitious professor of history at a school in southern Germany. The essay seems to be an opportunity for Brown, via the figure of the professor and his students, to reflect on some of his own philosophical and aesthetic concerns. He argues that good history writing needs to display many of the same techniques as good fiction writing: a “minute explication of motives,” a “well-woven tissue of causes and effects,” the “power of engrossing the attention” (Rhapsodist 145). More importantly, this type of writing should contribute to a certain kind of moral enrichment. “By exhibiting a virtuous being in opposite conditions,” Walstein explains, he is “displaying a model of right conduct, and furnishing incitements to imitate that conduct” (148).

This kind of moral instruction is effective, however, only to the extent that it is able to translate abstruse philosophical ideas into more accessible historical narratives. “Abstract systems, and theoretical reasonings,” Brown writes, “were not without their use, but they claimed more attention than many were willing to bestow [ . . . ]. A mode by which truth could be conveyed to a great number, was much to be preferred” (150). That mode, he goes on to explain, is one in which the writer pays close attention to concrete historical circumstance. “Truth flows from the union and relation of many parts,” he asserts, and chief among these, is “the detail of actions.” Such details “exchange the fleeting, misty, and dubious form of inference, for a sensible and present existence” (151). In short, by bringing sophisticated philosophical ideas down to earth in the form of a psychologically and historically concrete narrative, an author can maximize his moral efficacy.⁵ Accordingly, we might expect Brown’s own fiction to provide an imaginative framework in which high-minded philosophical discourse can be tested against the constraints of history and lived experience.⁶

Bearing in mind Brown’s desire to marry the philosophical and the historical, the abstract and the concrete, this chapter explores the ways in which Edgar Huntly seeks to ground two prominent strands of Enlightenment philosophy in the particular time and space of eastern Pennsylvania at the end of the eighteenth century. I aim to show that Brown specifically invokes the philosophical discourses of sensational psychology and Enlightenment property theory in order to place them into meaningful conversation with one another and with the history of Indian-settler conflicts in the region. More particularly, I argue that Brown draws on the sense psychology of Locke, Hume, and the French philosophe, Condillac, in order to posit a sophisticated phenomenological model of body-space relationships. This model allows Brown to more closely consider both the embodied and the social processes through which spatial boundaries get produced. Frontiers and frontier space, the novel suggests, cannot be understood apart from individual, embodied acts of spatial delimitation; that is, spatial boundaries get produced via a continuous process of small-scale phenomenological encounters between individual and Other. At the same time, for Brown, the production of boundaries also implies an initial appropriation, a taking possession, of the newly delineated space. Brown, I maintain, directly relates his treatment of body-space relationships to the property theories of Locke and Hume. By actively linking embodiment and appropriation, Edgar Huntly is able to chart a distinctive third path between materialist and contractual models of private property.

According to Brown’s theory of fiction, however, these theoretical investigations need to be grounded in a particular time and place in order to achieve their desired moral effect. Edgar Huntly accomplishes this by evoking the historical context of Indian-settler violence in Pennsylvania. In particular, the novel wrestles with the problematic history of the Walking Purchase and the subsequent dispossession of the Delaware tribe. What I would like to suggest is that Brown’s philosophical emphasis on embodiment has the additional, and radical, effect of restoring the vanishing body of the Indian to the history of border disputes and treaty violations. This is where the moral work of the novel begins. Brown’s philosophical arguments self-consciously call attention to bodies that have been erased, both literally and discursively, from the narrative of Pennsylvania history. Restoring those bodies to the narrative unsettles the moral framework of white colonial property claims. So just as Walstein recommends, in Edgar Huntly abstract philosophical reasoning gets tied to concrete history in the service of moral instruction.

By framing the novel’s sophisticated philosophical arguments within the context of Indian-settler property disputes, this chapter works to shift critical conversations about Brown away from the now familiar question of his political identification.⁷ Instead, the chapter helps open up the relatively underexamined issue of Brown’s status as a writer of philosophical fiction. W. M. Verhoeven has recently argued that Brown criticism is overdue for just this sort of correction. Verhoeven calls for more analysis of Brown’s “negotiations with eighteenth-century philosophical and historical thought” and of his “place in the tradition of what has been called ‘philosophical history.’”⁸ Significantly, some earlier work on Brown did indeed consider his use of sensational psychology, albeit in a fairly generalized fashion.⁹ This chapter is an effort to add to those earlier forays and to suggest some of the remarkable ways in which Brown linked sensational psychology to other philosophical concerns, particularly property theory.

At the same time, however, the chapter follows Brown’s own suggestion and considers the connection between his “theoretical reasonings” and the historical exigencies of the Pennsylvania frontier. This has the benefit of actively linking the “philosophical” criticism to some of the same historical and political issues that have preoccupied more recent Brown scholarship. The general trope of the frontier has of course long been important to readings of Edgar Huntly,¹⁰ but in considering the Walking Purchase in particular, Sidney Krause and John Carlos Rowe have recently disagreed about the political implications of Brown’s treatment. By factoring in the role of the body and of property theory, my argument forces a reassessment of Brown’s historical project here.¹¹

At the same time, the novel’s complex phenomenology of possession also forges a link between domains of eighteenth-century thought that are often considered in isolation. Intellectuals from Brown’s time to the present, have, for example, frequently approached the scientific and political writings of philosophers like Locke as largely independent works.¹² Brown’s novel suggests that this formulation may be an unnecessary dichotomy and that the two domains can be productively linked. And in terms of more contemporary theoretical debates, Brown’s model of spatial production and appropriation seems to weave together phenomenological and social constructionist understandings of space. Whereas phenomenology views space as the product of an individual body moving and sensing its way through the environment, social constructionism sees it instead as a kind of social morphology, the result of social behaviors and economic forces. Brown’s narrative suggests that these explanations need not be mutually exclusive; in fact, the production of space is best understood as a combination of both.

In order to effectively address these questions and to map out the complicated relationships that Brown constructs, this chapter is divided into three sections. The first of these describes Brown’s intervention into the debates of the sensational psychologists. Rejecting the predominantly visual bias of much Enlightenment thought (including that of Locke and Berkeley), Brown’s novel turns instead toward the ideas of the French philosophe, Condillac, a writer who emphasizes the crucial role of touch. This, in turn, helps Brown establish the importance of a fully embodied, multisensory relationship between individual and environment. The second section extends this discussion into a consideration of space and spatial boundaries. Theories of sense perception were (and are) intimately bound up with theories of space. Edgar Huntly makes it clear, following David Hume, that the production of space is fundamentally a phenomenological process. Finally, the third section links this embodied production of space to an act of appropriation. To produce a spatial frontier, the novel suggests, is also at some level to stake a claim to the spaces created. Exactly how this appropriation might occur, and how it might reframe a history of Indian-settler violence is the central concern of this chapter.

Condillac’s Statue and the Primacy of Touch

By the time he published Edgar Huntly in 1799, Brown had read deeply and widely across a range of Enlightenment thinkers and his fascination with sensational psychology was well-established. He was guided in these studies by his membership in Elihu Smith’s “Friendly Club,” a regular gathering of thinkers and literati in New York that was designed to foster lively discussion and intellectual community. The group read extensively in works of philosophy, art, politics, and history.¹³ Crucially for Brown, their reading list included not just British empiricists like Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, but also a varied selection of more radical French thought.¹⁴ As a result, Brown was able to track the debates about sensory perception as they developed over time and across national boundaries. Evidence of this deep-seated interest in sensation can be found in all four of his major novels, but the theme is especially prominent in Edgar Huntly.¹⁵ The novel repeatedly considers the role and function of the senses in conditioning an individual’s relationship to the environment, and it does so by turning to specific texts—even specific passages—involved in the sensational psychology debates.

Brown wastes no time in Edgar Huntly before signaling his interest in issues of sensation and embodiment. The opening paragraphs of the novel fixate on the ungovernable nature of the narrator’s sense impressions as they threaten to overwhelm his ability to construct a coherent narrative. Epistolary in form, the novel is constructed as a collection of letters sent from Edgar to his fiancée, Mary Waldegrave. Edgar begins the first of these letters disconcerted and upset. The “series of events” through which he has lately passed, he warns Mary, has utterly “absorbed his faculties” and “hurried away [his] attention.” Up to this point, it has been impossible “to disengage [his] senses from the scene that was passing or approaching.” He wonders if the incidents can even be “recalled and arranged without indistinctness and confusion” (643). One of the initial tensions in the novel is thus between the immediacy of bodily sense experience and the pause, or “repose,” needed for reflection, composure, and ultimately, composition. Such a tension broadly parallels the insistent psychological question of how the mind is able to form higher-order thoughts and “judgments” out of raw sense data. (The French philosophe, Condillac, in fact, specifically proposes the mechanism of “attention.”) But for the moment, it is enough to note that Brown’s first two paragraphs establish an investment in sensation that will reverberate throughout the book.

The fear of narrative incoherence that Edgar voices in these initial paragraphs also nicely prefigures the crazed, convoluted plot that will unfold over the course of the entire novel. Edgar’s tale begins with his discovery of a mysterious Irish immigrant, Clithero Edny, whom he witnesses sleepwalking under a giant elm tree on the edge of the settled territories. This arouses Edgar’s suspicions because his own dear friend Waldegrave (Mary’s brother) has recently been murdered by unknown assailants under the very same tree. Edgar begins following Clithero, tracking him as he somnambulates through the frontier wilderness. Eventually, he learns the mournful story behind the Irishman’s exile to America. Convinced of Clithero’s innocence in relation to Waldegrave’s murder, Edgar dispenses with any ideas of revenge and dedicates himself instead to the benevolent support of the exile. At this point, however, Edgar is beset with some difficulties of his own when he learns that the liberal inheritance of his fiancée (the seed money for their future together) actually belongs to someone else. The night after receiving this news, Edgar goes to bed upset, only to awaken disoriented in a subterranean pit in the middle of the wilderness. The second half of the novel follows Edgar through a series of violent confrontations with Indians as he makes his way back across the frontier and into the familiar territory of white settlement.

Edgar’s dogged pursuit of Clithero through the Pennsylvania woods is crucial not just for the peculiar relationship of “benevolence” that it establishes between the two men but also because it effectively sets up a contrast between vision and touch that is central to debates among the sensational psychologists. As Edgar tracks Clithero through “Norwalk,” that is, the rugged, hilly region between the Wind-gap and the Water-gap, he repeatedly oscillates between moments of panoramic vision and moments of near blindness in which he must often rely on the sense of touch. The two men move from precipitous views that are “in the highest degree, rugged, picturesque and wild,” into “dreary vale[s]” where “the faintness of star-light was all that preserved my senses from being useless to my own guidance” (656). They hike from “deepest thickets” and “darkest cavities” to “the most difficult heights,” approaching “the slippery and tremulous verge of the dizziest precipices” (659). At one point, Edgar follows Clithero’s trail into a cave of “intense dark.” Having (strangely) forgotten to bring a lamp or torch, he is compelled “to resort to hands as well as feet”: “I proceeded with the utmost caution, always ascertaining, by out-stretched arms, the height and breadth of the cavity before me” (726). Eventually, his hands lead him through the cave and out onto a “projecture of rock” high up on a cliff face. Here, he pauses to take in the view: “A large part of this chaos of rocks and precipices was subjected, at one view, to the eye. The fertile lawns and vales which lay beyond this, the winding course of the river, and the slopes which rose on its farther side, were parts of this exte...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Pierson v. Post and the Literary Origins of American Property
• 1. Walking the Property: Ownership, Space, and the Body in Motion in Edgar Huntly
• 2. Eating Dwelling Gagging: Hawthorne, Stoddard, and the Phenomenology of Possession
• 3. Anxieties of Ownership: Debt, Entitlement, and the Plantation Romance
• 4. Feeling at a Loss: Theft and Affect in George Lippard
• Epilogue. Wisconsin, 2004: Racial Violence and the Bodies of Property
• Notes
• Works Cited