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In Interior States Christopher Castiglia focuses on U.S. citizens' democratic impulse: their ability to work with others to imagine genuinely democratic publics while taking divergent views into account. Castiglia contends that citizens of the early United States were encouraged to locate this social impulse not in associations with others but in the turbulent and conflicted interiors of their own bodies. He describes how the human interior-with its battles between appetite and restraint, desire and deferral-became a displacement of the divided sociality of nineteenth-century America's public sphere and contributed to the vanishing of that sphere in the twentieth century and the twenty-first. Drawing insightful connections between political structures, social relations, and cultural forms, he explains that as the interior came to reflect the ideological conflicts of the social world, citizens were encouraged to (mis)understand vigilant self-scrutiny and self-management as effective democratic action. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, as discourses of interiority gained prominence, so did powerful counter-narratives. Castiglia reveals the flamboyant pages of antebellum popular fiction to be an archive of unruly democratic aspirations. Through close readings of works by Maria Monk and George Lippard, Walt Whitman and Timothy Shay Arthur, Hannah Webster Foster and Hannah Crafts, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Castiglia highlights a refusal to be reformed or self-contained. In antebellum authors' representations of nervousness, desire, appetite, fantasy, and imagination, he finds democratic strivings that refused to disappear. Taking inspiration from those writers and turning to the present, Castiglia advocates a humanism-without-humans that, denied the adjudicative power of interiority, promises to release democracy from its inner life and to return it to the public sphere where U.S. citizens may yet create unprecedented possibilities for social action.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Interiority and the Problem of Misplaced Democracy 1
1. "Matters of Internal Concern": Federal Affect and the Melancholy Citizen 17
2. Bad Associations: Sociality, Interiority, Institutionalism 60
3. Abolition's Racial Interiors and White Civic Depth 101
4. Ardent Spirits: Intemperate Sociality and the Inner Life of Capital 136
5. Anxiety, Desire, and the Nervous State 168
6. Between Consciousness and Revolution: Romanticism and Racial Interiority 216
7. "I Want My Happiness!": Alienated Affections, Queer Sociality, and the Marvelous Interiors of the American Romance 256
Epilogue. Humanism without Humans: The Possibilities of Post-Interior Democracy 294
Notes 305
References 351
Index 363
