Book Review

Riss, Arthur. Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century

American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
238 pp. $80.00.

Arthur Riss's Race, Slavery, and Liberalism challenges many influen-

tial contemporary critics of antebellum literature, arguing that they have
based their readings on an ahistorical idea of the liberal "person." Riss
understands liberalism as "an ensemble of discursive practices constituted
and bounded by a particular account of the priority of the 'person.'" Lib-
eralism insists that all rights emerge from the "person" rather than from
"some power above and beyond" (11). While liberalism precedes the Dec-
laration of Independence, the question of who qualifies as a liberal "per-
son" has changed dramatically over time. Two hundred years ago, it was
broadly assumed that "personhood" only encompassed propertied sane
white men. Today an account of the liberal "person," which encompasses
all human beings and insists that "contingent" qualities such as race are
insignificant to "personhood," has become so hegemonic that critics have
forgotten that it was constructed (7). Therefore, when liberal antebellum
thinkers have understood differences like race as fundamental rather than
"contingent" to identity, critics have seen them both as violating the te-
nets of liberalism and as making a false claim about human nature. Riss
argues that reading contemporary definitions of the "person" into ante-
bellum liberalism is both wrong, because it assumes that our current view
of "personhood" is true in some absolute way, and unproductive, because
it prevents critics from recognizing the cultural labor that nineteenth-
century thinkers put into constructing the "person."
Riss applies his ideas to five popular topics in antebellum literary
criticism: Harriet Beecher Stowe's views of race, the significance of Little
Eva's distribution of locks of her hair on her death-bed, Hester Prynne's
reattachment of the letter "A" to her chest, the nature of Hawthorne's
Donatello, and Frederick Douglass's fight with slave-breaker Edward
Covey. He explores both how each participates in the work of defining
"personhood" and how critics have mistaken this work.
Two chapters, "A is For Anything: US Liberalism and the Making
of The Scarlet Leuer" and "The Art of Discrimination: The Marble Faun,
Nathaniel Hawthorne Review'ii, no. 1 (Spring 2007)

72
 BOOK REVIEW 73

'Chiefly about War Matters' and the Aesthetics of Anti-Black Racism,"

are devoted to Hawthorne. "A is for Anything" is much more a critique
of Sacvan Bercovitch's The Office o/The Scarlet Letter than it is of The
Scarlet Letter itself Riss does not offer his own reading of the "A." In-
stead, he shows that readings by Bercovitch and others have approached
the topic with the assumption that "surface markers of identity are
contingent," and have wrongly imagined Hawthorne as sharing this as-
sumption, rather than exploring how Hawthorne's text participated in
an ongoing discussion about whether surface markers were in fact con-
tingent (133).
The next chapter reveals Riss's own understanding of Hawthorne's
position on "surface markers of identity" and how it informed his
views of black "personhood." While some have seen The Marble Faun
as exemplifying Hawthorne's refusal to engage in politics, Riss claims
that it engaged deliberately in the critical battle over whether liberal
"personhood" ought to include slaves. Riss first demonstrates that
"aesthetic" claims were central to antebellum arguments excluding black
men from personhood: racists maintained that visible differences between
the races and Blacks' inherent "ugliness" reflected the unbridgeable
chasm between the races and whites' innate superiority in qualities like
intelligence and morality. In Riss's account, Hawthorne was anxious
that external appearance, which is changeable, could not be a reliable
marker of race, and sought a more "secure foundation" for excluding the
"Negro" from personhood (149).
Riss reads The Marble Faun as fundamentally about the threat that
aestheticism poses to individuality. Hawthorne warns that participation
in the abstractions of the aesthetic requires self-abnegation and blind-
ness to the particularity of one's situation and therefore undermines in-
dividuality (156). Simultaneously, Riss claims that Donatello, "a purely
aesthetic creature, who incarnates the epistemological uncertainty of
the romance" is also a figure for the black man (136). Two years after
the publication of The Marble Faun, in "Chiefly about War Matters,"
Hawthorne would describe freedmen crossing from South to North as
"fauns" (136). He understood freedmen as embodying the perils of the
aesthetic because their current state was so distinct from the status to
which they laid claim. To imagine "Negro 'manhood'" was "to think be-
yond the Negro's obvious lack of education, civilization and preparation
74 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE REVIEW

for life in the North . . . to forget the literal, existing world and enter the
ethically perilous and essentially foreign realm of the Romance" (160). If
many racist thinkers of the day excluded "negroes" from the category of
"person" because their racial characteristics marked them as permanently
distinct from whites, Hawthorne, according to Riss, excludes them from
personhood because he saw their "embodiment" as dangerously unstable
(160-62).
One weakness of his reading of The Marble Faun is that Riss ignores
nativism. Perhaps it is too obvious to mention that, while Donatello
is arguably Black, he is definitely Italian. Yet because the antebellum
period had neither our tidy distinction between "racial" and "ethnic"
categories, nor that between "biological" and "cultural" traits, it is prob-
lematic to analyze how the book configures race entirely apart from the
anti-Catholicism that is so manifest in it. Much of Hawthorne's argu-
ment about the dangerous allure of the aesthetic, for instance, was pure
nativist rhetoric'
Riss made an unfortunate choice in his use of the term "person"
throughout the text rather than the dominant nineteenth-century term
"man." Apparently, he feared that using the now-jarring term "man"
when discussing many of his antebellum sources and "person" when dis-
cussing contemporary texts would unnecessarily complicate his discus-
sion of what is in essence a continuous concept. In contrast, he chooses
to use the nineteenth-century term "Negro," hoping that "the tension
between the transcendence (and thus innocence) of the term 'person'
and the clear historicity (and thus distortion) suggested by the term
'Negro' will 'animate' his argument about the produced nature of 'per-
sonhood'" (187). It is surprising that Riss, who is committed to under-
standing the historical specificity of the term "person," should have so
casually (he explains the significance of the substitution only briefly)
replaced a word so heavily freighted with the exclusion of women from
liberal "personhood" with a term much more amenable to gender-in-
clusiveness rather than using the term as a way to open up connections
between exclusions based on race and those based on sex.
Even if his readings are uneven, Riss succeeds in his efforts to ground
the historical specificity of the "person" in a more accurate understand-
ing of nineteenth-century American culture. At the same time, he has
done impressive work placing his readings of Stowe, Hawthorne, and
 BOOK REVIEW 75

Douglass into the context of political and scientific writings of their day,
such as slavery apologetics and ethnology. Probably the most fascinat-
ing example of this is his argument that hair served as a racial marker in
Little Eva's deathbed scene. Riss draws from the little-known antebel-
lum field of "trichology" (the study of hair) to show that many consid-
ered hair as a reliable physical sign of race even when skin color deceived
(97-106).
In exploring the problems caused by the reification of contempo-
rary notions of "personhood," this book invites scholars to resist the
temptation to project their own understandings and interests onto the
antebellum world, reminding them of its essential difference. It is an
exciting and bold, if imperfect, rethinking of the field, and deserves
serious attention.
Elaine Parsons
Duquesne University

Endnote

^ Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with

Catholicism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 12.