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“A Chaos of Sin and Folly”: Art, Culture, and Carnival in Antebellum America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

DAVID WALL
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Abstract

This essay looks at a variety of antebellum cultural productions and, utilizing Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque body, identifies the ubiquitous use of the tropes of carnival as a principal discourse in the construction of bourgeois subjectivity and the staging of its “low Others.” The essay examines the visual arts, popular literature, minstrelsy, and the freak show, demonstrating that as the grotesque body of the social and racial low Other is rejected and excluded socially, it returns constantly and repeatedly in narrative form. Appearing as it does across the broad spread of antebellum cultural domains, the grotesque body emerges as an object not only of disgust but also of deep and profound desire.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 3: Special Issue on Film and Popular Culture , December 2008 , pp. 515 - 535
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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References

1 David Henkin, “Word on the Streets: Ephemeral Signage in Antebellum New York,” in Vanessa Schwartz and Jeanenne Przyblyski, eds., The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 192.

2 See ibid.; and Eric Fretz, “P. T. Barnum's Theatrical Selfhood and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Exhibition,” in Rosemarie Garland Thompson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 97–107.

3 Edward Chapin, Moral Aspects of City Life (New York, 1854), 42.

4 Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 32.

5 Michael Feldberg, The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 42.

6 Edward Beecher, Narrative of the Riots at Alton (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1965; first published 1837), 44.

7 Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 11.

8 Allon White, “Hysteria and the End of Carnival: Festivity and Bourgeois Neurosis,” in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds., The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence (New York: Routledge, 1989), 161.

9 See Cockrell, 34–46.

10 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 180, emphasis in original.

11 White, 158.

12 See Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 23.

13 Stallybrass and White, 178, eio.

14 Ibid., 26.

15 Ibid., 21.

16 Ibid., 22.

17 David M. Lubin, Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 55.

18 William T. Oedel and Todd S. Gernes, “The Painter's Triumph: William Sidney Mount and the Formation of Middle-Class Art,” in Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy, eds., Reading American Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 138.

19 Ibid., 145.

20 David Bjelajac, American Art: A Cultural History (London: Laurence King, 2000), 167.

21 Barbara Groseclose, Nineteenth-Century American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 113.

22 Stallybrass and White, 9.

23 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 317.

24 Ibid., 317.

25 Ibid., 325.

26 Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 32.

27 Stallybrass and White, 145.

28 Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 118.

29 Stallybrass and White, 9.

30 Burns, 118.

31 Groseclose, Nineteenth-Century American Art, 113.

32 Burns, 52.

33 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux,” in The Portable Hawthorne, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: The Viking Press, 1969), 101–24. Page numbers follow citations in text.

34 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 30.

35 David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 317.

36 George C. Foster, New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches, ed. Stuart Blumin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990; first published 1850), 74. Subsequent page numbers follow citations in text.

37 Bakhtin, 7.

38 Ibid., 11.

39 Reynolds, 444.

40 Ibid., 316.

41 Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 140.

42 David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), 101.

43 William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 118.

44 Attracting large crowds of working-class whites, the increasing popularity of these black celebrations eventually resulted in their elimination. As early as 1811 in Albany, for instance, the city council outlawed “the erection of booths, tents or stalls within the city limits for the purpose of selling alcohol or food, the collecting together in numbers for gambling or dancing, and marching or parading, with or without any kind of music during the ‘days commonly called pinxter.’” Shane White, “Pinkster in Albany, 1803: A Contemporary Description,” New York History, 70 (1989), 191–99, 192. Similarly, in both Massachusetts and Connecticut, white elections were rescheduled from spring to October, thereby eschewing the seasonal significance traditionally attached to the festival period.

45 Quoted in Roediger, 102–3.

46 White, “Pinkster in Albany,” 193.

47 Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 31.

48 Ibid., 29.

49 Eric Fretz, “P. T. Barnum's Theatrical Selfhood,” 101.

50 Bogdan, 32.

51 Fretz, 101.

52 Ibid., 102.

53 James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 139.

54 Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 60.

55 Cook, 121.

56 Elizabeth Grosz, “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit,” in Rosemarie Garland Thompson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 56.

57 Ibid., 57.

58 Cook, 161.

59 Ibid., 124.

60 Michael Kammen, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 56.

61 Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 5.

62 Ibid., 22.

63 Joy S. Kasson, “Narratives of the Female Body: The Greek Slave,” in Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy, eds., Reading American Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 168.

64 Bjelajac, American Art, 218.

65 Kasson, 168.

66 Ibid., 166.

67 See Michell Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682–1861 (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 1997); Gary Ebersole, Captured by Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1995); Philip A. Dickinson, “The Captivated Self: Hybridity, the Carnivalesque, and the Cultural Labor of Subject Formation in Three American Captivities,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2000.

68 June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

69 Stallybrass and White, 3.

70 R. W. B. Stratton, Captivity of the Oatman Girls: Being an Interesting Narrative of Life among the Apache and Mohave Indians, 3rd edn (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983; first published 1857), 231.

71 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 96.

72 Oliver Larkein, Art & Life in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960), 180.

73 Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 216–17.

74 Stallybrass and White, 58.

75 Kasson, “The Greek Slave,” 175.

76 Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, 58.

77 See Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Vintage, 1977); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

78 Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 123.

79 Stallybrass and White, 5.

80 Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 149.

81 David Bjelajac, American Art: A Cultural History, 192.

82 Burns, Painting the Dark Side, xv.

83 Stallybrass and White, 5.

84 Ibid., 139, emphasis in original.