Civic Myths

A Law-and-Literature Approach to Citizenship

Brook Thomas

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780807858462, 9780807831533
• eBook ISBN: 9781469606798
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As questions of citizenship generate new debates for this generation of Americans, Brook Thomas argues for revitalizing the role of literature in civic education. Thomas defines civic myths as compelling stories about national origin, membership, and values that are generated by conflicts within the concept of citizenship itself. Selected works of literature, he claims, work on these myths by challenging their terms at the same time that they work with them by relying on the power of narrative to produce compelling new stories.

Civic Myths consists of four case studies: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and “the good citizen”; Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man without a Country” and “the patriotic citizen”; Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and “the independent citizen”; and Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men and “the immigrant citizen.” Thomas also provides analysis of the civic mythology surrounding Abraham Lincoln and the case of Ex parte Milligan. Engaging current debates about civil society, civil liberties, civil rights, and immigration, Thomas draws on the complexities of law and literature to probe the complexities of U.S. citizenship.

1
Introduction

Working on/with Civic Myths

The last decade and a half has witnessed a “return of the citizen.”¹ There are a number of reasons for this renewed interest. One is globalization. Globalization places pressure on the relative autonomy of the nation-state, which has defined citizenship since the demise of the medieval city-state. National boundaries are still in place, but they seem to play less of a role in many important transactions that affect people’s daily lives. For instance, Arjun Appadurai identifies five alternative “landscapes” that characterize contemporary global configurations: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes. For Appadurai, these flows of people, images, technologies, capital, and ideas render the territorial boundaries of nation-states obsolete.² Even if talk of the nation-state’s demise is premature, the increased fluidity of national boundaries does affect citizenship.³

For instance, by some estimates, soon 25 percent of people living in countries with modern industrial economies will not be citizens of those countries.⁴ That condition has led some to advocate returning to the city as a more logical unit for citizenship. Indeed, some cities have extended municipal “citizenship” rights to residents who are not citizens of the nation, recognizing their vested interest in the community by allowing them to vote in local elections.⁵

The increased flow of people across national boundaries has also challenged the idea of a unified national culture. Countries that once prided themselves on their homogeneity now recognize their multicultural makeup. The result is arguments for “multicultural” and “cultural” citizenship. Both defend the right of groups to have full citizenship while maintaining their cultural practices. For instance, in Multicultural Citizenship Will Kymlicka offers a sophisticated argument for group rights.⁶ Similarly, Renato Rosaldo calls “cultural citizenship” the “right to be different (in terms of race, ethnicity, or native language) . . . without compromising one’s right to belong, in the sense of participating in the nation-state’s democratic processes.”⁷

In a different context, however, cultural citizenship reaffirms the older notion of cultural homogeneity. With the move toward economic and even political unity in Western Europe, some have turned to culture as the primary realm to distinguish national identity. Concerned about the xenophobic sentiments that such arguments can foster, major thinkers, like Jürgen Habermas and Étienne Balibar, have theorized about citizenship with the prospect of European citizenship in mind. Habermas, for instance, argues that a “political culture,” not a shared language or “ethnic and cultural origins,” “must serve as the common denominator for a constitutional patriotism which simultaneously sharpens an awareness of the multiplicity and integrity of the different forms of life which coexist in a multicultural society.”⁸

There is even a third way of conceiving of cultural citizenship, one that has more to do with Appadurai’s mediascapes than with his ethnoscapes, with culture as an aesthetic category more than as an anthropological one. In a world of changing media, possibilities of citizenship, some have argued, will be affected as much or more in the realm of culture rather than in the realm of politics or economics.⁹

Other developments can be traced to events of 1989. For one, by eliminating the most obvious barrier to the worldwide flows of economic capitalism, the demise of the Soviet empire helped to generate the present obsession with globalization. Also, once the West was no longer pressured to wage an ideological battle with the Soviets, flaws in the practice of citizenship in Western, liberal democracies were much more readily acknowledged. One result has been a reconsideration of the work of T. H. Marshall, the most influential theorist of citizenship in the 1950s and 1960s. Marshall’s model grew out of the modern, democratic social welfare state that emerged in Europe from the ruins of World War II. He argued that citizenship had developed by guaranteeing three rights in chronological order: civil rights, political rights, and social rights. Civil rights gave all citizens equality before the law. Political rights allowed them to participate in the politics of rule. Social rights gave them basic economic and social security.¹⁰

If, on one hand, today’s arguments for cultural rights simply extend Marshall’s model by adding another right, on the other, his focus on rights and entitlements rendered his model incapable of accounting for the decline in citizenly participation in liberal democracies, signaled most poignantly by poor voter participation. If for conservatives that focus is itself a major cause of citizenly apathy, even leftist advocates of “radical democracy,” like Chantal Mouffe, have acknowledged problems with Marshall’s model and have sought new models of “active citizenship.”¹¹ Indeed, for many, the “velvet” revolutions of 1989 inspired hope in the ability of citizens to effect important political change through grassroots, participatory democracy, even in the face of the modern bureaucratic state.

This renewed interest in citizenship is prevalent in the United States. Mark Weiner reports that “in The New York Times, the phrase ‘American identity’ appeared 14 times from 1980–84; 17 from 1985–89; 47 from 1990–94; 104 from 1995–99.” There was an even more dramatic increase in the Lexis database for “Major Papers” that includes the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and others.¹² And that period of time precedes the events of 9/11, which further reinforced the importance of citizenship. On one hand, they led to a resurgence of patriotic feeling that increased many people’s sense of national belonging. On the other, the “war on terrorism” has drawn renewed attention to the importance of civil liberties for U.S. citizens. It has also demonstrated how important citizenship is, since suspected terrorists who are citizens have significantly more rights under U.S. law than aliens.¹³ At the same time, the fear of alien attacks has mobilized those concerned with protecting the nation’s borders at the same time that it has highlighted how porous those borders are.

Initially ignited by social scientists, the “explosion of interest in citizenship”¹⁴ has had an impact on studies of American literature. In the 1990s “citizenship” began to appear with great frequency in the titles of scholarly books and essays. In 2005 the American Literature section of the Modern Language Association chose citizenship as the topic to unite a discussion of its various divisions. The issues of concern for literary critics overlap with those of social scientists. Advocates of global and “postnational” American studies relish the opportunity to explore globalization’s effect on traditional notions of citizenship, and more and more of them are exploring possibilities of transnational citizenship.¹⁵ Similarly, disciplinary training makes various versions of cultural and multicultural citizenship especially popular topics.

Glenn Hendler identifies two trends in literary studies. One conceives of citizenship as “interior and cultural”; the other, in relation to “exterior forces.” Indicated by terms such as “imagined community, affective identity, or national symbolic,” the former thinks of citizenship as a “subjective process, as an affective dynamic,” described by Lauren Berlant as “a relation among strangers who learn to feel [citizenship] as a common identity . . . a sense of community or mass intimacy.” Exploring issues of migration, immigration, diaspora, and empire, the latter thinks of citizenship in political and economic terms. Generally, literary critics have paid more attention to affective notions of citizenship, often using the term much more broadly than political scientists and historians do. Even so, in one way or another, most try to combine Hendler’s two trends as they use citizenship as a category to chart the simultaneous formation of psychological and political subjects.¹⁶

I too am interested in how citizenship affects and is affected by interior states of subjectivity, although as I will make clear, I take issue with the theoretical model many literary critics use to explore that relationship. One of my chapters will also deal with the challenge transnational migration poses to existing determinations of citizenship. Nonetheless, my primary focus remains on national citizenship. This is not because imagining alternatives to it lacks importance. On the contrary, I learn from and encourage work that does so. Nonetheless, as Balibar, one of the most sophisticated advocates of transnational citizenship, acknowledges, even though we are more than simply a “national being, . . . we cannot of our own accord escape this determination.”¹⁷ Work on transnational citizenship by no means rules out continued work on national citizenship.

My approach is indicated by my title. Civic Myths plays off the title of the most important recent work on the history of citizenship in the United States: political scientist Rogers Smith’s Civic Ideals. Using a database of legislation and judicial decisions through the Progressive Era, Smith convincingly demonstrates that U.S. citizenship has been defined by conflicting traditions: liberalism, republicanism, and what he calls “inegalitarian, ascriptive traditions of Americanism.”¹⁸ I both endorse that argument and, more than most literary critics, share Smith’s interest in the role of the legal system. But I also focus on literary analysis.

The bulk of my book is four fairly long chapters that, drawing on legal analysis, relate different kinds of citizenship to literary works: the good citizen and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the patriotic citizen and Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man without a Country,” the independent citizen and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the immigrant citizen and Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men.¹⁹ I also look at the “cult of Lincoln” from multiple perspectives.²⁰ The concern with Lincoln generates a separate chapter on the 1866 Supreme Court case of Ex parte Milligan. Although each chapter examines a different, if sometimes overlapping, model of citizenship and related legal issues, these chapters are case studies that make no claim to provide an exhaustive account of U.S. citizenship or even how all works of literature relate to citizenship. They do, however, engage issues raised about U.S. citizenship by political scientists, legal historians, and others, such as Smith, Weiner, Judith Shklar, Linda Bosniak, T. Alexander Aleinikoff, James Kettner, Michael Schudson, and Kenneth Karst.²¹

The book has three goals. First, and most important, it tries to add to our understanding of both the country’s dynamic sense of citizenship and the complexity of these four literary works by showing how they work on/ with various civic myths. Second, it speculates on how a work’s engagement with civic myths can, in some instances, help account for that work’s accrual of cultural capital. Third, it tries to make a case for the role of selected works of literature in civic education.

“Myth,” of course, can have many meanings. The notion of civic myths draws on one articulated by René Wellek and Austin Warren, who state that “in a wider sense, myth comes to mean any anonymously composed story telling of origins and destinies: the explanations a society offers its young of why the world is and why we do as we do, its pedagogic images of the nature and destiny of man.”²² Smith, for instance, defines a civic myth as “a myth used to explain why persons form a people, usually indicating how a political community originated, who is eligible for membership, who is not and why, and what the community’s values and aims are.”²³ The term, however, does not originate with him. In “The Myth of Citizenship,” Michael Ignatieff refers to the “civic myth” of Cincinnatus that was so important for the Roman republic.²⁴ Indeed, it proved important for the United States as well, with George Washington becoming the American Cincinnatus.²⁵

Civic myths in the United States are numerous and varied.²⁶ Some exemplify broad themes such as the “virgin land,” “the land of opportunity,” or “manifest destiny.” They can also be about individuals, such as the numerous stories about the “founding fathers.” Or they can give meaning to various national symbols, such as the story of Betsy Ross and the flag. Many fit into Robert Michels’s categories of der Mythos der Woher, the myth of national origin, and der Mythos der Wohin, the myth of national destiny.²⁷ “In America,” Max Lerner wrote years ago, “the two converged in the myth of a democratic revolution and a revolutionary democracy.”²⁸ Even if Lerner’s “revolutionary” is a bit too strong, the myth of a perpetually renewing democracy that remains true to its founding ideals persists in the United States.

Smith describes the “great, perhaps indispensable value” of civic myths, which enable “a people to live together fruitfully and stably.”²⁹ Their ability to do so is illuminated by Claude Leví-Strauss’s understanding of myth. For Leví-Strauss, myth serves as cultural “glue,” binding a community or a people together through imagined stories that respond to real social contradictions or tensions.³⁰ In the Poetics Aristotle opposes mythos, as narrative and story, to logos, as dialectical discourse. Dialectical contradictions incapable of logical resolution, it seems, generate stories. So long as those contradictions persist, stories responding to them will persist.

Resulting from such contradictions, civic myths are a particular version of what elsewhere I have called cultural narratives. Stories without specific authors, cultural narratives help give meaning to social practices that cannot necessarily find a basis in rational logic. Despite claims to the contrary, the law, Robert Cover has argued, is such a practice. “No set of legal institutions or prescriptions,” he claims, “exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning.” To try, as Cover proposes, to understand law “in the context of the narratives th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Civic Myths
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Scarlet Letter
• 3 “The Man without a Country”
• 4 Ex parte Milligan
• 5 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• 6 China Men
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Index